AN EVOLVING SUCCESS IN ERREN RIVER RESTORATION

+ The Erren River originates at Neimen Township, Kaohsiung County and flows through seven townships before it enters the Taiwan Strait. “It was very beautiful when I was a child,” a local volunteer said, “however, heavy metals were illegally introduced into the river by industries along the river plate.” When “green oyster Incident” exploded In 1984, the government finally realized and faced the situation.

AN EVOLVING SUCCESS IN ERREN RIVER RESTORATION

By reintroducing the wetland soil, the pollution index in Hunei and Jiading Townships improved and the mangrove habitate started to restore. More tourists are visiting now, biking along the riverbed and enjoying the wetland animals.

AN EVOLVING SUCCESS IN ERREN RIVER RESTORATION

Hosted by the Hunei Township, the Festival for the Environment was located at the southern bank of Erren River. The Mayor Huang led the bike tour and introduced the river trekking. “ Combined with the famous tour site Hsingda Harbor nearby and local culture heritage,” Huang said, “ Erren River has the great potential to become another popular spot in the future.”

ERREN RIVER REMEDIATION

+ A project to clean up the Erren River running through the greater Kaohsiung and Tainan areas in southern Taiwan has reduced pollution by 32 percent from 2003, a worthy effort by the public and private sectors, President Ma Ying-jeou said July 6. “We expect the cleanup effort to be completed by 2019,” Ma said at an event showcasing the project organized by the Environmental Protection Administration. “It is a difficult task but it will be done.” Ma stressed that environmental protection should be given priority when industrial development poses a threat to the environment. Ma also took the opportunity to thank the volunteers who helped patrol the river and make the cleaning campaign possible. EPA Minister Stephen Shu-hung Shen noted that green areas and ponds have been built along the banks of the Erren River, allowing residents “to get close to the water source.” Shen pointed out that downstream fish species have doubled since the campaign began. “This is a very encouraging result,” he said. The Erren River was notorious for being one of Taiwan’s most hazardous waterways due to the industrial waste discharged into it. The river made headlines during the "green oyster incident” in 1986, when its water became heavily polluted by effluent containing heavy metals from nearby metal scrap smelters, contaminating the oyster population with high levels of copper. (SB)

Publication Date：07/07/2011Source： Taiwan Today

+ The Erren River should saunter sweetly through Tainan and Kaohsiung counties, past the city of Tainan, and into the South China Sea on its 65 km journey across southern Taiwan. However, activities along its banks have degraded this river to a foul flow of pollutants bordered by eight-foot-high walls of stripped electronic circuit boards.

+ The illegal recycling of electronic waste (also called e-waste), along with industrial activities, has so severely damaged the ecology of the Erren River that fish die within two minutes of being introduced into its waters. The water’s toxicity levels not only affect aquatic life, but damage human health as well. Life expectancy in the surrounding communities is 50 years, and the cancer rate is 27%.

+ Electronic waste recyclers and metal smelters accounted for approximately 80% of all illegal activity on the Erren. Taiwanese illegal e-waste recycling operations included ink recovery, burning of plastic-coated metals, plastics recovery, solder collection and gold extraction. All of these processes release multiple toxins at extremely high levels and are harmful to both the environment and human health.

+ Streams of E-Waste+ Gold recovery was one of the foremost e-waste

recycling operations on the Erren River and has particularly nasty consequences. Mixtures of 75% hydrochloric acid and 25% nitric acid are used to recover gold from computer components. After use, these acidic mixtures are dumped directly into the river and can cause the pH to drop dramatically. Testing of water and sediment samples at gold-recovery sites in China and India by Greenpeace China have revealed that lead, tin, copper, antimony, cadmium and nickel are all released from makeshift gold-recovery workshops.

+ The concentrations of lead, tin and copper found at these sites in China and India are over one hundred times higher than levels expected in an uncontaminated ecosystem. The toxicity of antimony is very similar to that of arsenic, and cadmium is considered hazardous by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency at only 1.0 mg per liter, but was found at 12.2 mg per liter at these sites. Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), chlorinated benzenes and beryllium are among the chemical compounds present in the waste streams from gold-recovery workshops—and all are toxic to humans and the environment.

+ The heavy metals, such as lead, cadmium and tin, on circuit boards pose an enormous threat to the river. A single circuit board contains and leaches enough lead to surpass the U.S. EPA’s hazardous waste standard by 30 to100 times. Both lead and cadmium are toxic to humans, plants and animals. Both are also bio-accumulative and can cause kidney damage. However, they differ in that lead affects blood circulation, the nervous system, reproduction and brain development, while cadmium inhibits calcium mechanisms, leading to bone density issues.

CITIZEN ACTIVISM

Professor Huan Zhang Huang and other environmental activists from Tainan Community College began monitoring the river in 1995. However, it took almost six years of diligent photo documentation of criminal activities and environmental data collection from the polluted river before the Taiwan Environmental Protection Agency took action and raided 70 illegal e-waste recycling sites in 2001.

Since 2001 the Taiwan EPA has spent NT$ 50-60 million (Taiwan Dollars) to clean up sites along the Erren. However, funding the clean-up effort has been difficult to secure, and companies that polluted the river have no legal obligation to pay for its restoration. On average, only one site is cleaned up every two years. One example of minimal effort to prevent run-off from contaminated private property into the river was when Taiwan EPA workers simply covered a remaining eight-foot-high banks of discarded circuit boards with tarps, leaving them to slowly decompose, further contaminating the river.

COMMUNITY RIGHT-TO-KNOW

+ Based on the latest information from the Taiwanese government’s eleven water-monitoring stations (Feb. 15, 2007), the level of pollution in the Erren River is still rated medium to heavy. However, Taiwan’s poorly enforced right-to-know laws leaves the local community with more questions than answers. Residents along the Erren have no access to information about what specific contaminants were found in river sediments during the EPA clean-up efforts, let alone how concentrated they are. There has also been no report released to the public on exactly how much of the sediments were removed, where these sediments were dumped or how extensive the remaining contamination is.

+ The Taiwanese people should not have to fear for their health in their own communities. To restore human and environmental health and safety, the government needs to speed up the restoration of the Erren River and enforce existing regulations to ensure that such atrocities do not continue. Taiwanese right-to-know laws need to be enforced, and residents along the Erren River need detailed information about the contamination of the river and the risks from living so close to this toxic body of water.