Taiwan Today

For people living in Taiwan in the 1980s, there was more in the air than the herald of the economic miracle. "People burning scrap, plastic-coated cable in the open air was a common sight, especially in the southern part of the island," says Hsu Kuang-jung, professor of atmospheric sciences at National Taiwan University. "They wanted the copper wire inside and burning the plastic off was the easiest way to get it."

The cable, imported waste from developed countries like the United States, was a good source of profit for Taiwanese scrap-metal dealers. What they did not know, however, was that the soot produced by burning the polyvinyl chloride coating contained highly toxic dioxins, pollutants which can cause anything from birth defects to cancer.

Out of the Smog

While the much-touted economic miracle made sure that basic physical needs were met and exceeded in Taiwan, it also caused an environmental catastrophe that has turned much of the west coast of the island into an industrialized and highly polluted mass of turbid concrete and tile blocks. And although the residents of small industrial towns live in unsightly conditions, the better-off dwellers in the island's larger cities--Kaohsiung, Taichung and Taipei--have in recent years seen their cities clean up their streets and waterways to a certain extent. "The consumption of natural resources and various kinds of pollution have exerted much more pressure on Taiwan's environment than it can bear," says Chang Kow-lung, minister of the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA). "But from the experiences of developed countries, we know that economic development is not necessarily opposed to environmental protection."

On the contrary, a healthy environment is crucial to long-term development. "In addition to immediate environmental damage and financial losses [incurred by lost opportunities], the medical expenses resulting from chronic diseases and the social costs that they incur could be huge," says George Cheng, a board member of the Taiwan Watch Institute, an environmentalist non-governmental organization (NGO).

Hsu Kuang-jung believes that Taiwanese people have gradually given up on businesses that may do harm to their health, even though they know such businesses are lucrative. As well as her university role, Hsu is a member of the Taiwan Environmental Protection Union (TEPU), another NGO founded in 1987. Organizations like TEPU began to appear in the mid-1980s, calling for the government to address environmental issues, the most contentious of which at the time was the construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant proposed by the then-ruling Kuomintang (KMT). The result of such civil groups' calls for a broad cleanup of the environment was the establishment of the Cabinet-level EPA in 1987 by the central government and the subsequent appearance of such bureaus at local government level between 1988 and 1991.

With the EPA's establishment, efforts to reclaim the environment picked up pace. The EPA cooperated with the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) in carrying out the Flying Eagle Project, intended to crack down on toxic emissions from factories and illegal waste burning. The MOI provided helicopters to trace the sources of air pollution and informed local governments of their locations. "The general public was very concerned about environmental pollution as well at that time. I got many calls reporting cases of cable burning," says Hsu Jen-tse, then working at the environmental protection bureau of Kaohsiung City Government. "I even saw people fighting with scrap metal dealers." According to Hsu, now a section chief at the EPA, thanks to intensive inspection and heavy fines, open-air cable burning quickly declined in the early 1990s.

Formosa Refurbished

These days almost all major sources of dioxins are now closely monitored and regulated. Both stationary and mobile air polluters, such as construction sites and motor vehicles, have had to pay pollution-control fees since July 1995, which are used by the government to improve the air quality, while those who fail to meet clean air standards are fined. According to the EPA, in general Taiwan's air quality is better than before: on average 6.83 percent of the days in 1994 saw pollution standard index values exceed 100 (which indicates unhealthy air quality), while the percentage dropped to 2.7 in 2003, although it rose in 2005 to 4 percent, partly due to sandstorms from the Gobi Desert dumping on the island.

Although the Air Pollution Control Act was promulgated in 1975 and has been amended six times since, it primarily regulates outdoor air quality. In December 2005 the EPA proposed standards for indoor air quality, which will regulate things like ventilation system design for public buildings. A law for the reduction of greenhouse gases was sent to the Legislature in September 2006 for deliberation. Including a stipulation that the central government establish an inter-agency coordination team to implement the regulations, the proposed law is a solid response to the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, from which Taiwan is excluded.

As well as improving the quality of the nation's air, EPA statistics claim that Taiwan's water is also getting better. In 2005, for example, 6.2 percent of the total 2,904 kilometers of rivers under the EPA's supervision are deemed highly polluted, down from 14 percent in 2002. The cleaning of Taiwan's rivers was enabled by the Water Pollution Control Act of 1974, which has since been amended many times, the most important of which occurred in 1987 and defined standards for effluent emissions from factories and farms. The EPA is now able to fine effluent offenders and thereby reduce the amount of untreated industrial wastewater.

Run-off from livestock has been a serious problem in catchment areas providing drinking water for cities, particularly throughout the populous western part of the island. The EPA solution to the problem was removing pig farms from five major catchment areas in 2001. A total of 640,000 swine were removed, mostly from the upper reaches of the Gaoping river, the main contributor to Kaohsiung City's water supply.

"One indicator of improved water quality of Taiwan's rivers is that the design of Taiwan's riverside areas now allows people greater access to the water," Huang Yi-chu observes, associate professor of the Department of Environmental Science and Engineering at National Pingtung University of Science and Technology. "The water quality can't be too bad if the authorities want people to get closer to it."

Now 47.5 percent of the river pollution comes from households, followed by 32.8 percent from the industrial sector and 19.7 from livestock. "This indicates that we should speed up the construction of sewage treatment systems, so that the problem of household wastewater can be solved," says Chang Kow-lung.

Only 15 percent of Taiwanese households are currently connected to a sewerage system, so there is a great urgency to build them. "It's already more costly to build sewerage systems than before because it gets harder and harder to do construction work as the population grows and traffic gets heavier," says Huang.

Over and Over

Garbage disposal and waste recycling are areas of phenomenal improvement. According to the EPA, trash produced in Taiwan before 1984 was largely disposed of randomly. The central government initiated a project for dealing with urban waste that year, assisting local governments in building landfills to take care of the ever-increasing amount of trash in populous areas. Seven years later, as the public's awareness of environmental protection grew and incinerator technology matured, the government encouraged the public and private sectors to build and operate incinerators. Today 80 percent of Taiwan's garbage ends up in incinerators, with most of the rest in landfills.

Then Taipei City mayor and now President Chen Shui-bian initiated a practice of keeping trash off the ground in 1997. His scheme involved people taking their rubbish to a certain place in their neighborhoods and throwing it into a truck at an appointed time. Prior to this, people dumped their rubbish at sites from which it was collected once a day. The practice has since spread all over the island, removing unsightly and unsanitary mounds of waste from the streets.

Recycling has also reshaped the island's garbage landscape. Separating garbage into four categories was first introduced in 1990 by the EPA's set of four cartoon-like "alien baby" dolls, into whose mouths people could dispose of recyclables. After this 15-year period of trash tutelage, in 2005 the EPA made it mandatory in 10 cities and counties to separate trash into three categories: kitchen leftovers, general and recyclable trash. The new regulations came into effect nationwide in 2006, and violators face fines up to NT$6,000 (US$181).

George Cheng thinks that the government's recycling program is especially successful. Indeed, the result of the recycling campaign in the past 17 years is encouraging. 863 grams of waste was produced by every person in Taiwan every day in 1979. The figure was at its highest in 1997, reaching 1,143 grams, but had declined to 619 grams by the first half of 2006. Meanwhile, the amount of trash recycled has risen to 26.61 percent of the total, up from 5.87 percent in 1998.

What Lies Ahead

Despite the progress that Taiwan has made in cleaning up the environment, activists are still unhappy about the current situation, stating that today the island still gives priority to economic development over environmental protection. "We could do much more to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and prevent global warming," says Hsu Kuang-jung, citing two major construction projects: Formosa Plastics Group's steel refinery and Chinese Petroleum Corp.'s newest naphtha cracking plant in Yunlin. These two high energy-consuming plants will produce a significant amount of extra greenhouse gases per year, according to Hsu.

Although the projects in southern Taiwan still have to face environmental impact assessments, they were allowed to proceed by the Executive Yuan just days before the Kyoto Protocol took effect on February 16, 2005, and have been sharply criticized by environmental groups. "Taiwan is not a signatory of the protocol, but that doesn't mean we won't be punished by the international community if we don't take steps to curb greenhouse-gas emissions," Hsu Kuang-jung says. In fact, she thinks that it is even easier to sanction Taiwan for not following the rules of the game because of its weak international status. "These projects have immediate benefits, like the creation of jobs and high production value, but we have to think big," she says.

Equally controversial is the construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant on the northern coast of Taiwan, which began in March 1999. Construction was suspended for several months in 2000 by the newly-elected Democratic Progressive Party government in an attempt to fulfill pledges made to environmental groups before coming to power. However, construction was resumed in February 2001 due to a ruling on the government's actions by the Council of Grand Justices, a judicial body created solely to interpret the Constitution. Environmental groups were greatly disappointed by the ruling, despite the Executive Yuan's decision not to construct more nuclear power plants once the plant is completed. The groups will continue to exert pressure on the government even after the scheduled completion of the nuclear plant in 2008.

Although Taiwan's environment has largely changed for the better, there is always room for improvement. The emergence of incinerators, for example, has helped take care of the garbage that used to be dumped around the island, but Taiwan needs to take steps to solve the problem of waste disposal in a more thorough manner. According to George Cheng, burning waste risks producing toxins, especially when many of Taiwan's incinerators mix household and industrial waste. Cheng suggests Taiwan dedicate incinerators exclusively for household or industrial waste. "We should try harder to reduce the amount of the trash in the first place," he says. There are many ways to do so, such as the use of recyclable glass bottles which are already widely seen in shops in more environmentally conscious countries, Cheng says, urging the government to play a more active role in policy making.

Hsu Kuang-jung thinks that the general public should pay attention to environmental issues constantly. "Taiwanese are interested in domestic political struggles much more than plain domestic ones," she says. "Environmental consciousness is increasing only in the sense that we are more concerned about environmental changes that directly and immediately affect our health."

Huang Yi-chu believes that Taiwan's politicians should desist from acting as barriers to environmental efforts. "It's not unusual for elected leaders to pressure authorities into allowing pollution," he says.

Twenty years after the anti-nuclear movement began in Taiwan, three nuclear power plants are providing the nation with electricity and another is still under construction. NGOs may despair of achieving their goals of a nuclear-free future or a world in which incinerator-produced dioxins are satisfactorily addressed. But as Taiwan is emerging from the haze of the economic miracle, the clouds of toxic smoke from cable burning are clearing a way to a healthy environment.

Taking a walk in the wetland park on the right bank of the Gaoping river near Dashu in Kaohsiung County is now one of Huang Yi-chu's favorite pastimes. He finds it a picturesque place for leisurely exercise and, with its disused railroad bridge, it is also well-used by photographers snapping newly-wed couples.

Cry Me a River

The riverside area, like many other sections of the Gaoping river, however, was once an eyesore and an affront to the olfactory sense as well. "My mother always warned me not to get close to the river when I was a child," says Huang, a Dashu native. "It was so dirty." With the largest drainage area in Taiwan at 3,257 square kilometers, the 171-kilometer-long Gaoping was notorious for the "great wall of trash" piled up along its banks that separate Kaohsiung from Pingtung counties. Except for the unfortunates who grew crops amidst the rubbish, few people wanted to go near the slow-moving sludge of household garbage and industrial waste, host to wild dogs, vermin and mosquitoes.

The excrement of the 1.6 million pigs raised along the upper reaches of the Gaoping, which provides tap water to much of the Kaohsiung area, also contributed to the low quality of the water. As the pollution produced by the excreta of one pig is about four times that of an adult human, the rearing of swine has long been the major cause for the river's filth and squalor.

Talk of cleaning up the river started with the growth of environmental consciousness in the late 1980s. "A great civilization must have a great river, and the Gaoping river is the cradle of southern Taiwanese culture," says Tseng Keihai, an environmentalist who has been associated with the river's rebirth since 1994. "However, we haven't paid enough respect to the river, which is the mother of all things living around it."

Filial piety aside, no significant action was taken by the local or central governments to deal with the pollution until 1998. In fact it was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease on the island in 1997 that reduced the number of riverside swine to about 480,000, caused great financial loss to pig rearers and jolted the government into action. The following year the EPA required piggery proprietors on the upper reaches of five rivers in western Taiwan to cease their porcine pollution in exchange for compensation. The main focus was on Gaoping river, since approximately 80 percent of the swine the EPA targeted lived along it. By 2001, there were only 7,000 porkers left on the banks of the Gaoping.

With the completion of three incinerators in Kaohsiung and Pingtung counties in 2001, local governments were able to dispose of large quantities of garbage with ease, and the great walls of rubbish along the Gaoping's banks became a thing of the past.

Rights of Association

Private non-profit groups from the communities along the river have also played a role in cleaning it up. The Old Railroad Bridge Association in Dashu was founded in 2001 by the current township mayor Tseng Ying-chih. Removing weeds and trash and planting trees, the 30-odd association members have, little by little, changed the face of the riverside below the old bridge. Their effort moved the county government to design and build a wetland park near the Gaoping river. Completed in 2005, the 120-hectare park is now taken care of by the association, membership of which has grown to 180 people. "I spend eight hours a day in the park tidying up or guiding visitors. It's tiring but worthwhile," says Chen Chang-cheng, a retiree. "Twice a month, more than 100 members show up for a major cleanup."

"One feature of the park is the absence of rubbish bins," says Lin Li-hui, head of the association. "I hope this can make visitors produce as little trash as possible. If they do, I hope they can take it back home. Not a single piece of trash should be left here." As implausible as it sounds, the policy seems to be working. "Nobody was ashamed to pollute in the past because everyone did it, but now almost everybody cherishes the hard-won cleanliness," says Wen Cho-chi, an association member and an elementary school principal.

Another feature of the redevelopment is the system of 13 ponds which treat wastewater organically. Plants are grown in each pond to absorb the nitrogen and phosphorus in the community's wastewater that cause eutrophication, reducing oxygen in the water, before it flows to the river. Microorganisms in the sediment at the bottom of the pools remove other pollutants at the same time.

The association's effort to save their hometown has paid off. Now the wetland park is becoming the most popular place for locals to spend their leisure time and an emerging tourist attraction in the town. More importantly, the cleanup has set a good example for other communities along the Gaoping river to change their environment. A second non-profit private group in Dashu township dedicated to taking care of another section of the river is taking shape.

According to the Water Resources Agency of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the total area along the Gaoping river set aside for leisure activities has reached 1,500 hectares. The river has gone up a notch or two on the national water quality standard--before pig farming ceased, it could not even make the lowest level.

Despite its obvious improvement in the past five years, the Gaoping river still faces challenges. Sewerage systems have yet to be completed along the comparatively populous middle and lower reaches of the river. Construction of a giant pipeline started in 2005 near Laonung Creek to take water from the Gaoping tributary to the Zengwen Reservoir in neighboring Chiayi County in order to provide water to growing industry on the lower reaches of the Zengwen river. The government says it will only divert water from Laonung Creek when its flow is high, but Tseng Keihai has strong doubts about this. "This is faulty policy," he says. "Humans shouldn't try to change nature." Apparently fighting for the health of the Gaoping river will go on.