A million tonnes of furnace slag pollute farmland in Qishan, and after six years of struggle, wastewater still overflows every year

Six years on, the controversy over "farmland buried under furnace slag" in Dalin Village, Qishan District, Kaohsiung City, is still burning and remains unresolved! Since 2014, every summer, whenever there is continuous rainfall or a sudden downpour, the soil in the slag backfill area becomes oversaturated with water, and milky-yellow wastewater overflows onto the neighboring farmland.

In August of this year (2019), the wastewater appeared again, overflowing into the surrounding banana, papaya and coconut plantations. In early September, the wastewater receded, leaving a thick layer of sediment in the fields and irrigation ditches, to the deep distress of the farmers. The biggest victim among them is 76-year-old veteran farmer Lin Zheng-nan, who poured out his grievances to reporters: "It was clearly ruled the year before last that what is buried in the soil is waste, and the city government was ordered to require the operator to clear it away in accordance with the law, but even now, the operator is still building walls and patching walls, obviously intending to drag it out forever!"

Farmland went from abandoned plantation to grand canyon, and finally became a furnace slag burial site

The "Xiaogong Shengjun" temple in Dalin Village, Qishan, Kaohsiung, is just a small shrine at a three-way intersection, but because it was credited with quelling a local plague epidemic seventy years ago, the two nearby villages both regard it as the center of their faith.

Seventy-five meters northeast of the Shengjun Temple lies a 7-hectare plot of farmland, where sand and gravel were illegally mined in 1996, leaving a pit with a total area of about 5.2 hectares and a depth of more than 20 meters. Such pits collect water and become ponds, a common sight on remote farmland in the Gaoping region, long jokingly called "grand canyons" by locals, and the pit in Dalin Village later became an important water source for residents' fishing and farmers' irrigation.

In May 2013, just as the rice ears across southern Taiwan were turning golden, residents noticed truck after truck dumping unidentified fill material into the pit day and night, taking turns in relays. Zheng Miao-zhen, chairwoman of the Dalin Village Anti-Waste Slag Self-Rescue Association, said that between May 2013 and June 2014, these pits were indeed backfilled with 1 million tonnes of slag stone - purchased from China Steel Resources and produced during the steelmaking process at China Steel Corporation - by the landowner, Huang Yin-ling, who is also the head of Jianfa Construction, and Dai Wen-qing, head of Wanda Material Technology.

Banished from farming and livestock, a sorrowful fate; rural Dalin is not at peace

In fact, as early as 1999, the Kaohsiung City Government had already approved China Steel's residual steelmaking slag stone to be registered as a "product" in its factory registration certificate, so when the Kaohsiung City Environmental Protection Bureau received public complaints in 2013, it could not handle the slag buried in Dalin's farmland under the "Waste Disposal Act." At the time, the Kaohsiung City Government combed through every statute, and in the end the Land Administration Bureau fined the operator NT$60,000 under the "Regional Plan Act."

But a mere NT$60,000 could not stop the slag from advancing onto the farmland; after 1 year and 1 month of dumping, the original pit had been filled flat.

Looking back at the earlier life of this slag-backfilled farmland, it began as rice paddies, banana plantations and pig farms. Later, it went through the decline of agriculture in the 1970s and the government's 1990s policy of removing livestock from the Gaoping River area, and finally became an illegally mined sand and gravel pit and a burial site for the steel industry. From then on, Dalin Village became the most troubled rural village in Qishan.

China Steel subsidiary: slag can be used for paving roads and building houses

China Steel Resources is a subsidiary of the China Steel Group. Initially it was responsible for innovating and adding value to the uses of slag stone, a byproduct of China Steel's processes, and later expanded its operations into resource regeneration and pollution remediation, such as processing and trading slag stone powder, cleaning up waste-contaminated sites, and remediating soil and groundwater pollution. This is also why China Steel's slag stone was sold through China Steel Resources to Jianfa Construction and Wanda Material for disposal.

Xu Deng-ke, director of the technical office at China Steel Resources, explained that slag is called "slag stone" in the industry and is a byproduct of China Steel's integrated steel production process. As long as it undergoes stabilization treatment, it can generally be used for roads, artificial fish reefs and breakwater blocks. "For example, a 1.7-kilometer stretch of dense-graded asphalt concrete was paved on Nanxing Road in Kaohsiung City. Because slag stone was added, it is especially sturdy and durable, and it even won recognition with the 16th Public Construction Golden Quality Award."

In addition, Xu Deng-ke further explained: "We have also successfully developed permeable asphalt, and sections of National Highway No. 6 and National Highway No. 1 have already been paved with it, which can prevent water accumulation when it rains and reduce the water spray caused by high-speed driving."

Control Yuan corrects the Kaohsiung City Government: slag must not be backfilled into farmland

But the meaning and value of slag as a product in no way alleviates residents' concerns. In May 2014, members of the Dalin Village Anti-Waste Slag Self-Rescue Association, the Zunhuai Culture and Education Foundation, and the Environmental Action Group of Tainan Community University went to the Control Yuan to petition. In February of the following year, the Control Yuan issued a correction against the Kaohsiung City Government: "The Kaohsiung City Government clearly knew that agricultural land may not, in accordance with the law, be backfilled with converter slag and other steelmaking slag... yet allowed the backfill area to continue expanding to 5.2 hectares, with a quantity exceeding 990,000 metric tonnes (about 25,950 truckloads), seriously damaging the credibility of the government. There is indeed a violation, and therefore a correction is proposed in accordance with the law."