Those living along the coast of Changhua County are on edge and their discontent has been intensifying. A mega garbage incinerator is to be built in the Changhua Coastal Industrial Park (彰濱工業區) to handle the entire country’s industrial waste, but the area already has the highest density of incinerators nationwide.
In addition to the forthcoming incinerator, there are already six in operation. Worse, Changhua is between the coal-fired Taichung Power Plant in Longjing District (龍井) and Formosa Plastics Group’s naphtha cracker complex in Yunlin County’s Mailiao Township (麥寮).
The air pollution cannot be more serious. Dioxin and PM2.5 levels exceed the maximum allowed by regulations. The lung cancer mortality rate in Lugang Township (鹿港) and neighboring Fusing Township (福興) is 1.5 times higher than the national average. After the mega incinerator is completed, the situation will definitely get worse.
Cancer has been the leading cause of death in Taiwan for 40 consecutive years, and lung cancer has been the most common over the past 18 years, the Health Promotion Administration has said.
Academia Sinica research has also found that, as a result of air pollution, females are more prone to genetic mutations that can lead to cancer. Since 2020, the lung cancer mortality rate of women has been higher than that of men.
Improving air quality should be an urgent task.
The construction of the mega incinerator in Changhua has begun, but the contractor has already contravened the regulations. With a syndicated loan of NT$4.2 billion (US$136.9 million), this build-operate-transfer project is set to make Lugang’s air quality worse. The sky will become darker, as will the lungs of those living nearby.
Within 30 years, the number of lung cancer cases in Lugang has increased fivefold, and in Fusing it has risen eightfold. Having allowed a mega incinerator to be built in the area, officials have not once thought about residents’ lives.
Without communicating well with locals, the contractor and the officials launched the project saying that the environmental impact assessment process has been completed.
Perhaps the construction corporation is too powerful to be regulated by laws, and the government has been too arrogant to take public opinion into account.
Yeh Hsuen-che is a physician in Lugang Township.
Translated by Emma Liu
Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention. If it makes headlines, it is because China wants to invade. Yet, those who find their way here by some twist of fate often fall in love. If you ask them why, some cite numbers showing it is one of the freest and safest countries in the world. Others talk about something harder to name: The quiet order of queues, the shared umbrellas for anyone caught in the rain, the way people stand so elderly riders can sit, the
Taiwan’s fall would be “a disaster for American interests,” US President Donald Trump’s nominee for undersecretary of defense for policy Elbridge Colby said at his Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday last week, as he warned of the “dramatic deterioration of military balance” in the western Pacific. The Republic of China (Taiwan) is indeed facing a unique and acute threat from the Chinese Communist Party’s rising military adventurism, which is why Taiwan has been bolstering its defenses. As US Senator Tom Cotton rightly pointed out in the same hearing, “[although] Taiwan’s defense spending is still inadequate ... [it] has been trending upwards
After the coup in Burma in 2021, the country’s decades-long armed conflict escalated into a full-scale war. On one side was the Burmese army; large, well-equipped, and funded by China, supported with weapons, including airplanes and helicopters from China and Russia. On the other side were the pro-democracy forces, composed of countless small ethnic resistance armies. The military junta cut off electricity, phone and cell service, and the Internet in most of the country, leaving resistance forces isolated from the outside world and making it difficult for the various armies to coordinate with one another. Despite being severely outnumbered and
Small and medium enterprises make up the backbone of Taiwan’s economy, yet large corporations such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) play a crucial role in shaping its industrial structure, economic development and global standing. The company reported a record net profit of NT$374.68 billion (US$11.41 billion) for the fourth quarter last year, a 57 percent year-on-year increase, with revenue reaching NT$868.46 billion, a 39 percent increase. Taiwan’s GDP last year was about NT$24.62 trillion, according to the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, meaning TSMC’s quarterly revenue alone accounted for about 3.5 percent of Taiwan’s GDP last year, with the company’s
RSS