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By Chiu Yu-Tzy, Staff Reporter,Taipei Times

TAIPEI, Taiwan 23 November 2001  -- GARBAGE GANGS: Police have arrested members of a criminal group whose aims are the export of hazardous toxic waste and dumping poisonous sludge into rivers.

Environmental inspectors and police yesterday arrested members of a criminal organization that aims to illegally export hazardous industrial waste to other countries and dump toxic sludge into Taiwan's rivers.

Working with inspectors from the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA), police officers with the Criminal Investigation Bureau yesterday arrested three suspects in both Taipei and Taoyuan counties. Police, however, are still looking for the group's leader, Tseng Sheng-feng. Police said the organization had established at least two import-export companies, including the Resource Finder Co, to secretly export hazardous industrial waste overseas.

The EPA exposed two criminal cases involving the company earlier this year. In June, the company failed in an attempt to export waste contaminated with cadmium and lead labelled as "zinc waste and scrap" to India from Taichung Harbor. In August, the company failed in its bid to export hazardous heavy-metals labelled as "ash and residues of copper compounds" to Australia from Keelung Harbor.

The company, however, has made profits of at least NT$100 million by exporting more than 20 cargo containers of toxic waste to other countries, including Australia and China, according to a local Chinese-language newspaper.

Early yesterday morning, police seized two cargo containers of hazardous copper-tainted sludge at an illegal factory in Sanhsia, Taipei County. The site is one of the company's waste transfer stations.

Police with the Criminal Investigation Bureau told the Taipei Times yesterday that the case has been taken over by the Taipei District Prosecutors' Office. The officers said that the sources of the toxic waste and the link between Resource Finder Co and its overseas counterparts would be the focus of the investigation.

EPA officials said the cross-border transportation of hazardous waste is a violation of the Basel Convention. Although Taiwan is not a signatory of the convention, EPA officials said such activities could give the country a bad reputation in the international community.

A case in 1998 involving Formosa Plastics Corp did just that when the company was found to have transported mercury-tainted waste to Cambodia.

Yesterday, police and EPA inspectors managed to prevent another environmental crime in Sanhsia. A truck driver in the employ of the criminal group was arrested by police near a plant where he was about to discharge polluted sludge into the Sanhsia River. Police detained the driver and confiscated over a dozen bags of unidentified sludge for further examination.

Environmental inspectors soon confirmed the contents of the bags as sludge contaminated with heavy metals.

By counting empty bags left nearby, EPA officials estimated that about 200 tonnes of sludge had already been dumped into the river.

"It's completely outrageous. They have committed the same crime of dumping toxic solvents in different counties," Wu Sheng-jong, head of the EPA's North Region Branch Inspection Bureau, said yesterday.

Wu said that the group had dumped toxic etching solvents and sludge into rivers in Luchu in Taoyuan County, and Shulin in Taipei County, earlier this year.

Wu Tung-Jye, chairman of the Green Formosa Front (GFF), said that arbitrary pollution activities by illegal factories, some sheltered by local political factions, pose a great threat to the environment.