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TAIWAN TO BURY MERCURY-LACED WASTE AT HOME

REUTERS

TAIPEI, August 5 -- Taiwan has found a temporary home for some 3,000 tonnes of mercury-laced industrial waste rejected by Cambodia and the Unitited States -- on the property of the company that produced it, Formosa Plastics.

Taiwan's Environmental Protection Administration said on Thursday it would allow Formosa Plastics to temporarily bury the waste domestically if it could not find overseas disposal sites.

"We agreed in principle to allow Formosa Plastics to temporarily handle the waste disposal domestically," the administration said in a statement.

The administration said Formosa had applied to move the waste to its Mailiao petrochemical complex in southwestern Taiwan for temporary disposal.

The petrochemicals company had originally dumped the waste on open ground outside the southern Cambodian port city of Sihanoukville in late 1998, and its discovery in December sparked a panicked exodus in which several people died.

Formosa took back the waste, keeping it at a pier in southern Taiwan, trying to ship it to the United States, but the plan fell through after environmentalists persuaded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to revoke a dumping permit.

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