Taiwan Sending Toxic Wastes to Netherworld

The furor over a December toxic-waste shipment from Taiwan to Cambodia, according to an Associated Press story, has raised an irksome question: Where do Taiwan's industrialists dump their toxic waste?

The December incident involving Taiwan's Formosa Plastics Corp., which shipped 3000 tons of mercury-contaminated waste to Cambodia, has conjured at least one possibility: The world's poor nations.

Formosa Plastics said it mixed the waste with cement for sending abroad. It labeled the shipment "cement blocks" because it did not believe the block to be hazardous. The company recently agreed to remove them from Cambodia.

Although no proof exists of other similar exports, a government report shows that about 1-million tons of the total of toxic waste generated by Taiwanese companies in 1997 is unaccounted for.

Ting San-lung, head of the Environmental Protection Bureau in southern Kaohsiung, says he can't tell how much of the waste has been exported, but admits to loopholes in Taiwanese laws. He said that the country's biggest problem is finding places to store its industrial waste.

Plans to build incinerators or landfills have met with strong objections by residents partly because they lack confidence in the standards of public projects, which have been marred by corruption and shoddy work, Ting said.

Objections from citizens have left Taiwan's state-run power company with no place to put its low-level waste from three nuclear power plants.

The company first sought unsuccessfully to ship it in Russia. Later a deal to store the waste in North Korea was scrapped following protests from South Korea.

Most recently, residents of the tiny Taiwanese island of Wuchiu rejected the nuclear waste, despite an offer of U.S.$93 million.