Taiwan Today

Taipei grew up around the Tamsui, the island's only navi­gable river, and just thirty years ago area residents washed their rice and brewed their tea with water from the river. "When I was young, we often swam in the Tamsui," remembers Huang Tsai-jung, an elderly Taipei resident who grew up near where the river empties into the Taiwan Straits. "It was very clean, es­pecially during high tide, and when you dove into the water you could see bril­liantly colored fish."

Today, a walk along the lower reaches of the Tamsui is anything but pleasant, and swimming is totally out of the question. Much of the lower 103 km of the 159 km river is lined with garbage, and the water is severely polluted. The vile-smelling river is virtually depleted of oxygen, its turbid flow able to support only single-celled organisms. Birds, fish, and people stay away.

The pristine headwaters of the Tamsui, high in the Central Mountain Range along the southern edge of the Taipei basin, are fed by an average of three thousand millimeters of rain per year. But the water quickly changes character when the river reaches the 300 sq. km Taipei basin and starts its meandering course to­ward the Taiwan Straits. It is here that the Tamsui and its major tributaries—the Hsintien, Keelung, and Tahan rivers—pick up their heavy load of pollutants, primarily from people, factories, pigs, and landfills.

The basin, which is administratively divided into Taipei city and Taipei county, is home to about 6 million people, 30 per­cent of the island's total population. The residents have not been kind to the rivers draining the basin. A breakdown of the pollutants fouling the Tamsui indicates the major sources of degradation: 65 percent domestic waste water and sewage, 18 percent industrial run-off, 14 percent ani­mal farm waste, and 3 percent garbage leachate. (Leachate is the pollution created when rainwater seeps through layers of garbage in a dump or landfill and then seeps into the surrounding soil or flows into a nearby river.) The result is a dead river that is not only unfit for recreational use, but also constitutes a substantial health hazard.

When the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) was upgraded from a bureau in 1987, cleaning up the Tamsui became one of its top priorities. But the problem has proved to be exceptionally complex. Earlier predictions about the amount of time, funds, and effort needed to bring life back to the river have been overly optimistic.

In 1987, the government appropriated US$740 million as part of a three-year plan, administered by the EPA, to help improve the river's condition. Last year, the results spoke for themselves: the fa­miliar smell and color of the river indicated that the Tamsui was still heavily polluted. In fact, the only noticeable change was that the original budget estimate for the first stage of the cleanup had doubled to US$1.48 billion, the result of inflation, exploding land values, and rising labor costs. When Premier Hau Pei-tsun called then EPA administrator Eugene Chien to a special cabinet meeting to explain why the river cleanup project had not succeeded, Chien made specific reference to the severe difficulties in appropriating land for sewage treatment plants and other pollution control facilities as well as what he called "poor inter-agency cooperation."

Yet the cleanup work on the Tamsui continues, and a close look at the process is illustrative of how difficult it is to cor­rect any environmental problem in Tai­wan. The problem is compounded by the island's three decades of rapid population growth, unchecked industrial expansion, and shortsighted agriculture policies, as well as a maze of overlapping and confusing administrative responsibilities.

Although the failure to clean up the Tamsui was a stiff blow to the EPA's im­age, Jaw Shau-kong (趙少康), the EPA administrator since June 1991, says the blame doesn't lie primarily with his or­ganization. "While we coordinate this project, it is actually supposed to be carried out by local governments," he says. "And very often they just hide the problems and don't report them."

As examples, Jaw cites a Taipei county government claim that there was no problem with land appropriation for a major sewer line to feed into a planned ocean outfall. In fact, landowners along the route did not want to give up their land, or else asked astronomical prices for it. Moreover, fishermen in the harbor where the sewer line was to pass on the way to the ocean would not let the construction crews use their wharf unless they agreed to some very unreasonable conditions and de­mands, most of them involving heavy compensation requests.

Another irritating example related to the main sewer line cropped up near the town of Tamsui, not far from the river's mouth. Workmen found a 2 km stretch of extremely hard rock, which quickly stalled the project. "But a geological survey was done every six hundred meters along the route before they started this project," Jaw says. "I don't know how they missed the rock then. Now, they still don't know how to deal with the problem." He adds that the EPA is in part to blame because it did not supervise the ground survey better.

Although some environmentalists think the river is beyond hope, other peo­ple are more optimistic. Says Edward Rimberg, director of the Hazardous Ma­terial Control Research Institute in Washington, D.C., and now head of a lo­cal environmental consulting firm in Tai­wan: The problem of cleaning up the Tamsui is not insurmountable if Jaw can pull together a multidisciplinary political team from all the different government agencies involved, including the military and the Department of Health. Then he can sit down with them and say, 'This is our common problem, let's look at it the way other countries have looked at it.'

Rimberg refers to successful cleanups in the U.S. and Spain, where river basin commissions were set up to pull together all of the people involved, taking into account the ecological, health, and legal problems. "In these cases, a plan was formulated to take care of the entire river basin," he says. "A similar plan here would cut across various administrative juris­dictions."

According to Jaw, the government has already considered such a possibility. "There was a plan to have one organiza­tion, set up like the Tennessee Valley Authority, to handle the whole river area," he says. "But instead, we decided to im­prove the communication and cooperation between each government level. The EPA is coordinating the project, but so far I don't think we have done the job very well."

Part of the problem is insufficient manpower. "Previously there was only one person assigned to coordinate the en­tire Tamsui River cleanup project," he says. "That was ridiculous. Later, the staffing was increased to five people, but that was still not enough. Now I've asked for additional personnel." Included in the expanded staffing is one person whose full-time job is to serve as the EPA's liaison with the city, county, and provincial governments. "This is necessary," Jaw says. "You can't just sit in the EPA offices and wait for their reports every two or three weeks."

The problem itself is massive. Consider the major sources of the Tamsui's pollution—untreated domestic waste water and sewage, pig farms, factory wastes, and landfills—and weep for the EPA.

Taiwan's rapid population growth has often outpaced its public infrastructure support services. One of the most glaring shortages is in water and sewage treatment facilities. Today, only three percent of the island's total sewage receives any treat­ment. The other 97 percent, except for what ends up in crude septic tanks, is all discharged directly into the island's rivers and streams. Most homes have two waste systems: one for sewage, the other for water run-off from sinks, bathtubs, and floor drains. Sewage is piped directly to an underground sewer system, but waste water is normally channeled into curbside drainage ditches, which are usually, but not always, covered in urban communi­ties. Waste water is almost never treated before being discharged into waterways.

Although the 2.7 million residents of Taipei have a better sewage system than most parts of the island, still only 22 per­cent of the domestic sewage is treated before it is dumped into the Tamsui. Just across the river in Taipei county—for in­stance, Yungho city, where the population density is roughly 41,000 per sq. km—there is virtually no sewage treatment. The result: basin residents contribute tons of raw sewage to the river each day.

Present EPA estimates are that by 1993 the river will be cleaned up enough to eliminate its characteristic stink. But the first major stage of the pollution control project, which includes a massive network of underground sewage lines, will not be completed until 1998. The total length of the system now under construction is 1,150 km. The main east-west trunk line, which is four meters in diameter, will be 90 km long. In theory, all the sewage from residences, factories, and livestock farms will feed into the new sewage network. The final destination is a planned waste water treatment facility in Pali, at the mouth of the Tamsui. The facility, to be completed at a cost of US$2 million, will be operating by 1997. At that time, it is slated to process 3.3 million metric tons of waste water every day. The partially treated water will then be piped to an outfall 7 km at sea.

Almost half of the underground sewage network has been completed so far, even though construction creeps along at a rate of just a few meters each day. But once completed, the domestic waste water and sewage problem will still not be solved.

"Actually, once the whole network is completed 1997, it will only decrease domestic pollution of the Tamsui by about 40 percent," says EPA consultant K.M. Yao. While it will have taken almost ten years to construct an intricate underground sewage network, it will take even longer to connect it to all of the residential dwellings. "According to law," Yao continues, "once a sewage network is available to residents they are required to connect to it within six months."

But the law has been very difficult to enforce. "On one hand, most residences were constructed with no provision for future connection to a sewage system," Yao says. "So that means putting people's bathrooms and kitchens out of commission for up to a month while modifications are made. Also, who pays for the hook up? By law, homeowners are supposed to pay. But they haven't been willing to do so. They say, 'What difference does it make to me where our waste water goes?' In some areas, we have a pilot project where the government is footing the whole bill, but even that has met with resistance. Ac­tually, much of the 40 percent of domes­tic household waste water which we say will enter the sewage system by 1997 won't come from direct household con­nections. Instead, we will build intercep­tor stations to channel the water from the present open waste water ditches into the main lines. It could take another thirty years before the whole thing really func­tions like a sewer system network."

No less worrisome for the health of the Tamsui is the factory waste problem. The river drains waste emissions from some heavy-duty industrial polluters, in­cluding chemical, dyeing, food process­ing, electroplating, and paper factories. Although the amount of factory wastes being poured into the river each day is less than one-third the volume of domestic waste water, the statistics are misleading. In terms of toxicity, factory run-off is in many ways far more serious.

Again, the Tamsui is a microcosm of Taiwan's environmental problems. The island uses an estimated twenty thousand different industrial chemicals, six thousand of which are highly toxic. Many eventually end up in rivers and streams. While industry is responsible for the im­pressive economic development of the past three decades, the high costs to the environment are only now being recognized. As recently as the mid 1980s little attention was paid to controlling factory emissions, or treating factory wastes be­fore releasing them into rivers. Jaw Shau-kong explains: "When people are poor, their only concern is making money. They say, 'When we become rich, we'll do something about the environment.' But once they become rich, they find it's too late. That's the way it always is."

Despite the severity of the problem, there is currently no budget allocation specifically targeted to reduce industrial pollution. Instead, various government agencies have been made responsible for improving their inspection and control of polluting factories. Factories are expected to install their own anti-pollution facilities in compliance with government regula­tions. But monitoring, catching, and forc­ing violating factories to improve has been one of the weakest, and most highly criti­cized EPA functions. In fact, laws, stand­ards, and enforcement all need to be improved.

Edward Rimberg says, "Factories here have ways to get around regulations. For example, one of the largest textile manufacturers passes water emission inspections by diluting all of its waste emissions with clean water. Besides still pouring the same amount of wastes into the river, they are also depleting ground or reservoir water." Moreover, it is not uncommon for factories to dump their waste water into the river at night to avoid detection. And even if a factory is caught, fines are too minimal to serve as deter­rents. In June 1991, the Legislative Yuan tried to put more teeth into the law by passing the Clean Water Act, which includes fines for polluting factories up to US$22,200 for every day their waste water emissions exceed legal levels. This is a tenfold increase over the previous law.

But as environmental researcher and writer H.H. Yang says, "The EPA has encouraged passing and amending laws concerning polluters, but that's not the real problem. The basic problem is that en­forcement is very bad. The EPA often says that enforcement is the responsibility of local governments. But at the same time that the EPA tries to pass on the responsi­bility, it doesn't want to give local gov­ernments the power to decide what to do about their environmental problems."

Even if given the power to enforce the law, local governments often find themselves on uncertain ground. For example, the Taipei county government fined a food processing company for 188 consecutive days of discharging waste water beyond the daily allowed volume. The company refused to pay the fine, which exceeded US$200,000, arguing that the method of computing waste water emissions should be based on the degree of pollutants in the water, not on the volume of water dis­charged.

After six months of discussions, the Taipei county EPA decided to drop the case. Chen Hui-chen of the county EPA explains: "We need more time to research the standards to be applied in determining water pollution." Illustrating the current administrative confusion, Chen denied that the central government had already given them standards to go by, and also said that the county EPA had decided to drop all similar pending cases.

Over 70 percent of Taiwan's garbage ends up in the island's four hundred landfills. And one-third of these are located along rivers. One of the largest, the Neihu landfill, lies along the Tamsui. The huge landfill holds an estimated 8 million sq. meters of garbage. Although it was closed in 1985, it continues to pollute the Tamsui.

"The Neihu landfill was built twenty years ago when no one was paying any attention to environmental protection," says Robert Chen, a professor in the Graduate School of Environmental Engineering at National Taiwan University (NTU). "The trash was dumped there without any sort­ing and without any cover soil to separate the layers, as is common practice in a well­-maintained sanitary landfill. Also, a great deal of toxic material is between all the layers of ordinary garbage. This is now entering the river in concentrated form as leachate." Toxic leachate from numerous dumps and landfills along the Tamsui now accounts for an estimated 3 percent of the river's pollution.

Large amounts of garbage also over­flows from dump sites into the Tamsui. It can be seen bobbing in the river and lining the banks for kilometers downstream from dumping sites. And when typhoons or heavy winds come, the garbage is blown upstream to the mouth of drinking water plants, so divers must be called in to clear away the trash. "For someone taking a walk along practically any river in Taiwan for the first time, it might come as a sur­prise to find garbage piled along the river banks," says Eddie Yu, who is also a professor in the Graduate School of Environmental Engineering at NTU. "You might even come across trucks from local gov­ernments dumping garbage there. And people follow the government's lead by throwing their garbage there as well. Banks lined with garbage are a standard characteristic of our rivers. It's as if that's their reason for being."

But in many instances, local govern­ments have no alternative to riverside dumping. There are just not enough landfills available. According to Samuel Chen, deputy director of the EPA's Bureau of Toxic Waste Management, limited land "forces us to use open dumping along rivers and oceans." The problem is illustrated by an incident this past summer in Sanhsia township of Taipei county. Garbage was stacked on the streets for ten days because there was nowhere to put it. The nearby county landfills were all full.

Under heavy pressure from residents to do something about the garbage, which was attracting rodents, flies, and mosqui­toes, the township chief ordered the garbage dumped near the Tamsui. But it was not only dumped a few hundred meters from the river's edge, but also upstream from the Panhsin water treatment plant, which supplies drinking water to tens of thousands of people. The water treatment plant officials said the dumping was ille­gal, and demanded that it be stopped immediately. The township chief responded by saying: "When the county gives me somewhere else to put the garbage, I'll stop dumping it near the river." Eventu­ally, another landfill was made available for the community's use.

Dealing with the garbage problem along the Tamsui will cost an estimated US$370 million. But given the scarcity of land in Taiwan, the future of garbage treatment seems to lie in incineration, not landfills. One new incinerator in Neihu will begin operating this year, and another US$345 million will be spent on building others in the Taipei basin. The pressure for alternatives to landfills is growing in pace with the increase in population. And as society becomes wealthier, per capita garbage increases. The island's garbage problem is doubling every ten years, with a production of an estimated 36,000 tons per day estimated by the year 2000.

The Sanhsia landfill incident illus­trates how jurisdictional problems can complicate the resolution of pollution problems. Sometimes the conflict between the central and local governments over cleanup turns into political jockeying. You Ching, Taipei county magistrate, has pro­posed his own plan for dealing with the river pollution problem, including relo­cating factories and pig farms away from the river. But land acquisition problems make this alternative seem highly un­likely. He also complains that the central government is not willing to spend the money that is necessary to clean up the river. After one recent EPA function he told reporters: "If the EPA thinks they are going to spend less than NT$100 billion [US$3.7 billion] and have an odor-free Tamsui by 1993, they're dreaming."

The problems of inter-governmental cooperation may continue to hinder not only the Tamsui River cleanup, but other projects as well. C.R. Yeh, a local lawyer who specializes in environmental issues, says stricter anti-pollution laws won't solve the present problems. "Environ­mental law is only one aspect of the whole legal structure," he says. "Some environmental problems come from other areas of law, including constitutional issues. For example, the separation of powers between the central and local governments. This is a very serious problem here in Taiwan. If Jaw Shau-kong can't cope with the tension between the central and local governments, he won't be able to enforce the existing policy successfully."

Jaw is well aware of the challenge. "The cleanup of the Tamsui is a matter of great importance to a large percentage of Taiwan's residents," he says. "I hope that all of the government agencies working on the project can put the cleanup first, and politics second."

Despite the problems encountered thus far in the Tamsui cleanup, some chords of optimism have been struck. For example, during a recent environmental conference in Taipei, Professor Liu Cheng-chun from the University of Ha­waii said: "If quality control can be main­tained, I think the first stage of the river cleanup project will bring about a notice­able improvement." Liu also suggested that the government should periodically reassess the project in line with the constant upgrading of environmental tech­nology. He also stressed the importance of immediate cooperative action from both the public and private sectors: "Given the great variety of pollutants which are being dumped into Taiwan's rivers, we can't wait. Instead, we all have to start working together to clean up the island's rivers."

One indication that things are moving in that direction comes from action being taken to correct the serious pollution from pig farms along the Tamsui. Pork is the most popular meat in the local diet, and the island has over 8 million pigs. The volume of waste given off by each pig is four to six times that of a human being, which means that sewage from pigs is 160 to 240 percent greater than that from the human population. A quarter of a million pigs are raised on pig farms along the banks of the Tamsui. As elsewhere on the island, they are along the river for con­venience. Farmers routinely dump pig wastes directly into the water; no farmer has sewage treatment facilities. It is no coincidence that Taiwan's ten most pol­luted rivers all have pig farms along their banks.

Twenty-two different government agencies from the central, provincial, county, and city levels met recently at the Council of Agriculture to discuss the problem of pig wastes along Taiwan's rivers. A three-point proposal was put forward. It will limit legal pig farms to their present size, increase crackdowns on illegal pig farms, and offer pig farmers incentives to shut down their farms and go into other businesses. The proposal met with general agreement on the government level, but details have yet to be worked out before the proposal is sent to the Executive Yuan for approval.

Resolving the problem in the private sector may not be as easy. K.H. Huang, deputy director of the EPA's water qual­ity control bureau, says: "The problem points out conflicts between our environmental and agricultural policies. We let the pig farmers get rich at the cost of polluting the rivers. Now it has become a social problem. We couldn't eliminate all the pig farms now even if we wanted to."

Taiwan currently exports large quantities of pork to Japan and other countries, but the government is consid­ering the possibility of limiting pig raising, allowing enough only to meet domestic needs. While this would cut down the pig population, it would also break the rice bowls of many pig farmers, certainly an unpopular political decision. This is an­other case of conflict between economics and the environment, with the government caught in the middle.

Whether it is the disposal of human, factory, or pig wastes, the solution is clearly complicated. As fonner EPA ad­ministrator Eugene Chien says, "We've been polluting this island for more than thirty years, but we've had an EPA for just over three. We're not going to catch up with the environmental quality of a coun­try like the United States overnight. But I'm confident that if we carry out our environmental policies with consistency, we will see a new Taiwan going into the twenty-first century."

Current administrator Jaw Shau-kong has a similar assessment: "The Tamsui project is the first major cleanup of a river in Taiwan. Over 100 km of the river is seriously polluted. If you figure it took South Korea four years to clean up 36 km of the Han River, then the Tamsui project could take well over ten years."—Jeffrey H. Mindich, a long-time contributor to the Free China Review, is a broadcast jour­nalist for ICRT( International Community Radio Taipei), where he is known as the "Toxic Avenger."