Taiwan Today

In late May of this year, the Free China Review asked a group of experts to discuss and evaluate Taiwan's most pressing environmental problems. The seminar was hosted by editor-in-chief Jiang Ping-lun (江炳倫), and the participants were Jay Fang (方儉), editor-in­-chief, Earth Day Taiwan (a bimonthly magazine); Lee Jui-ming (李瑞明), dean of students, Chengyuan Junior High School in Taipei; Frank C. Lee (李慶中), deputy administrator, Environmental Protection Administration (EPA); and Eddie Yu (於幼華), a professor in the Graduate In­stitute of Environmental Engineering, National Taiwan University.

Jay Fang: "Serious" is the best way to describe the extent of Taiwan's air, water, and noise pollution. It has already contributed to an increase in sterility, miscarriages, and malformed babies. Unfortunately, there is very little follow­-up investigation of these cases, and there is insufficient statistical information.

Pollution is as serious a problem in the countryside as it is in urban areas. And although night soil is no longer used on the fields, the substitution of chemical fertilizer is now a serious concern. Also, our farmers' use of pesticides per unit of farmland is the highest in the world. So now people worry not about bacteria, but about heavy metals. If one knows about the overuse of fertilizer and pesticides, there is no freedom from fear.

Environmental awareness has in­creased over the past two years, but it's still not much more than lip service for both the government and the public. While people frequently call for environmental protec­tion, they have not taken much more action than in the past. The government and the people will eventually pay for today's pollution. For instance, our national health insurance program is scheduled to start a few years from now, and it requires a budget of US$10 billion a year. The costs will actually be higher, because people will have more pollution-related illnesses.

In the industrial sector, pollution control won't succeed through external pressure alone. It requires self-awareness on the part of the industries themselves. So, unlike the environmental campaigners in the past, I associate with industrialists and try to convince them to support environmental protection. I tell them that minding the ervironment does not mean they will lose money or have to close down. Environmental protection and economic development should supple­ment each other, and they both require ef­ficient management.

The government repeatedly empha­sizes the importance of environmental protection. Yet the Six-Year National Development Plan does not have an overall evaluation of how it will affect the environment. For a plan that will cost more than US$300 billion to implement, that's unacceptable.

Lack of success in environmental protection is often attributed to insufficient laws. In fact, we have enough laws. Be­sides environmental laws, parts of the civil and criminal codes apply as well. The problem is there has yet to be a consensus in society on the importance of environmental protection. [Former] EPA administrator Eugene Chien [now the Minister of Transportation and Communications] said that each government department should recognize its responsibility to protect the environment. I completely agree. The EPA should function as a coordinator and catalyst among different government or­ganizations.

From time to time, the EPA fails in its own responsibilities. For example, it has had unsatisfactory results from its garbage classification project. But private organizations also have a role to play. Surprisingly, an Earth Day magazine project was able to collect four tons of used batteries within two days. So I'm optimistic that people are aware of envi­ronmental issues.

The government and government­ owned companies are often blamed for not abiding by environment regulations. People worry most about waste disposal by military camps. Because information about them is restricted, there is no way for the public to know the amount of toxic waste the military is producing. At least I've never seen any reports. I wonder if the EPA has collected any information on this.

Also, the government should give tax reductions and other incentives to businesses that make an effort to control pol­lution. I have asked the financial authorities about this possibility, but they indicated that such an evaluation couldn't be done without the EPA's assistance.

As far as environmental education is concerned, I think we have insufficient knowledge of our own island. For exam­ple, we may know the location of the headwaters of the Yellow River and the Yangtze River, but not that of the Tamsui River. A lot of the best statistics and other information about Taiwan were compiled during the Japanese occupation. Under such circumstances, how can we expect people to know and love this land? Even the government hasn't educated itself, so how can we blame the public?

Lee Jui-ming: I think the current level of environmental awareness in Taiwan is very high, both for the public and for the government. The government is working on pollution control, and the public is participating in anti-pollution activities. But it seems that there is a conflict inside the government itself. It hasn't decided which is more important, economic development or environmental protection. When it comes to major construction projects, environmental protection concerns lose out.

Generally speaking, there is less pollution. On beaches or along the rivers, we find less garbage than two or three years ago. It may take us ten or twenty years, or even longer, to clean up the en­vironment. But as long as we keep work­ing, we will finally succeed. Our biggest success so far is the establishment of na­tional parks and conservation areas. On the other hand, the greatest potential disaster is the blind pursuit of economic develop­ment. This usually means immediate profit, while we may have to wait for decades to profit from our efforts in envi­ronmental protection.

Family, school, and social education play very important roles in solving environmental problems. Family education has the most direct influence on children, because they learn from their parents every day. The schools can help students under­stand the whys and hows of environmen­tal protection. The students can be taught how not to pollute the environment as well as how to protect it. For example, students can be taught how to reduce and classify trash at home. They can take home what they have learned at school and influence their families. But we need more college departments and technical schools con­cerned with environmental areas. Then, more people could learn professional ways of handling these problems.

TV programs, movies, and the mass media are very powerful means of social education. The concept of environmental protection can be effectively passed to the public through these channels. Big en­terprises can also play a part in social education. For example, a food company may advertise that it uses paper bags in packaging their ice cream bars instead of plastic bags which are not biodegradable.

Education is a long-term process. Aside from the lectures given by teachers and environmental experts at my school, we also have many related activities on and off campus. We spend a lot of time collecting environmental statistics and information on our polluted rivers. We then pass this information on to our students. In off-campus programs, we take students to national parks to help them understand the importance of the envi­ronment and why it should be protected. They have shown great interest in all these activities.

Frank C. Lee: This is perhaps the time for me to talk about our environmental protection projects. The US$305 billion Six-Year National Development Plan has various significant projects that tie in with the EPA's goals. Over the next six years, the EPA expects to spend more than US$10 billion to solve environmen­tal problems.

For example, to help clean up our air, unleaded gasoline will gradually replace our current heavy use of leaded gas. In July 1991, new exhaust standards were set to regulate motorcycles. We have also raised the fines on factory-generated air pollution, and serious violators face heavier penalties, including prison terms. The most severe penalty for a violator is now seven years imprisonment.

Water pollution is another serious problem. Taiwan has twenty-one rivers, twenty-seven major tributaries, and a hundred streams. Our statistics show that our rivers are seriously polluted. As part of the six-year plan, the EPA will spend US$3.3 billion to help clean them up. This is about one-third of our total environ­mental protection budget.

Garbage disposal is another major problem that we are desperately trying to solve. One of the headaches of this prob­lem is the lack of landfills. Currently, only 60 percent of the garbage is disposed of adequately, and that is not a satisfactory statistic. In the six years ahead, we plan to build twenty-one incinerators and open seventy-eight landfills. We had a budget of US$2 billion for handling garbage in the next six years, but it's getting more diffi­cult and much more expensive to obtain appropriate land for landfills.

We are also emphasizing environ­mental protection education programs. A center for environmental education is being established at National Taiwan Normal University to train teachers and compile textbooks in this area. Take garbage classification, for example. We have been encouraging primary and secondary school students to do this, and the results have been very satisfactory. Through our creation of the cartoon rabbit "Jebby," we hope that children will pay more attention to keeping their environment clean.

Concerning state-run enterprises, we hope that they can set a better example by paying more attention to the environ­ment. Take the Taiwan Sugar Corpora­tion, for example. Pig-raising is one of its major businesses. This causes pollution. Recently, we have pushed the corporation to increase the pace of its construction of waste water facilities. There are around 8.5 million pigs on this island, and it is estimated that the quantity of waste they produce is double that of our 21 million population. We are therefore taking this matter very seriously. We have also set more stringent controls on the emission of waste water and air pollutants from gov­ernment-run enterprises.

Eddie Yu: I think politics plays an important role in environmental protection. Our government's first priority is not environmental protection. The EPA has been working very hard, but if we want major improvements in the near future, it can't be done by the EPA alone. The whole government needs to be concerned about the environment. I give great credit to the EPA for what it has accomplished, but it doesn't have enough power and money because high-level government officials have not caught up with worldwide envi­ronmental trends.

In my opinion, the greatest potential disaster in Taiwan comes from water pollution and nuclear pollution. The funny thing is, the EPA doesn't have the author­ity to regulate nuclear power plants, and it lacks authority over some of the water areas as well.

Although the government listens more to public opinion now, it still needs to improve. The government should communi­cate more with the public as well as with experts, instead of handling everything on its own. Environmental problems should be treated as public issues.

But the EPA is wrong on one thing: they should handle environmental impact assessments themselves and not let other government authorities do them. Behind these evaluations is the idea that prevention is better than the cure. The assessments are very powerful weapons for the EPA, and it should make greater use of them. Farming them out to other organizations is a big mistake, and I hope that it is not too late to change the practice.

Lee: I would like to hear your opin­ion on whether the government should compensate people for the construction of an incinerator in their neighborhood.

Fang: Many people are against building incinerators near their homes. The government tells them that incinera­tion is one way to save resources, but that's a big joke. At least incinerators in Taiwan still cannot be used for that purpose. Take the incinerator in Neihu, for example. The government spent a huge amount of money to build it, yet the chimney is only half the height of the original design, be­cause it's not far from the Taipei domes­tic airport. The original plan did not take the problems of air traffic control into consideration, and now the smoke can't escape into the upper atmosphere.

Refuse incineration does reduce gar­bage, but usually the cinders are hazardous waste. At present, there are no disposal facilities in Taipei for this waste. And since the incinerator will be operated by the government, I wonder if it can monitor itself well enough. During most of the year, Taipei's air is a health hazard. It's easy to imagine the result if 3,000 tons of garbage are burned each day in Taipei.

I don't consider building incinerators as the first priority. Take Taipei county for instance, even if it were given a free in­cinerator, it couldn't afford the maintenance costs. The most urgent issue is to reduce the quantity of garbage. For years, the government has been trying to solve the garbage problem, but after spending so much money, the problem is still growing. That's unacceptable for us taxpayers.

Yu: One of the major problems about the operation of incinerators lies in the much higher percentage of plastic sub­stances in the garbage. I don't know why such a factor was not considered when the incinerators were being constructed sev­eral years ago. I am also worried about the incinerator in Neihu. Its chimney has perhaps the largest diameter in the world. Why does it look like this? And although the height of the chimney was cut in half, three burning units were still installed in the incinerator. It will cause problems.

The government is often criticized for not doing a good or fast enough job in preventing various pollution problems. I think it has something to do with the fact that our government stresses economic development instead of environmental protection.