Exposing the world's highest dioxin contamination, Huang Huanzhang has pursued environmental poisoning for 26 years, never compromising in the fight against black and white

Huang Huanzhang says the waters of Taiwan, China are colored. Red is waste acid, milky blue is strong alkali, purplish red is incinerator bottom ash, and emerald green is stainless steel slag. Also, after iron dissolves out, the river turns latte-colored. "I have been in the environmental movement for 26 years, yet Taiwan, China's environmental protection has kept regressing. Many countries adopt more scientific methods to handle industrial waste, but we only know how to bury it." At the very start of the interview, Huang Huanzhang said bluntly: "If there is progress, it is only that the methods of collusion between officials and business have become more advanced."

Under the Nanding Bridge on the Erren River, Upstream and Downstream climbed the cement-grouted slope with Huang Huanzhang, who said that everything beneath our feet was electronic waste. "Since the 1960s, Taiwan, China has helped the whole world process electronic waste. Operators gathered along the banks of the Erren River, discharging waste acid at will, and hauling the unwanted electronic garbage left after processing to the banks of the Erren River for dumping." Years of wave impact caused the earthen embankment to wash away, and printed circuit boards, keyboards, wires and cables were all scoured by the stream to the riverbed and flowed into the sea...

On the opposite bank, at the mouth of the Erren River, that is where Huang Huanzhang began his environmental activism. In his early years, in order to photograph beautiful sunsets, he chased the evening glow to the banks of the Erren River, and was shocked to see a "road of dead fish" stretching three kilometers upstream from the estuary! For those devastated living creatures, for that sobbing river, he shed a grown man's tears. With a change of heart, he devoted himself from then on to the environmental movement, starting with saving the Erren River. The reason the electronic waste beneath our feet was sealed with cement grout and no longer continues to pollute the river is precisely one of his contributions.

"Short on money? Burn it and you have it!" Scholar joins environmental activism, vows to restore the Erren River's innocence

Huang Huanzhang is from Xinying, Tainan. Going barefoot and fighting crickets were part of his childhood routine. A country kid who studied all the way to a doctorate in chemistry and became quite respectable teaching at a university, he had no grand ambitions in life, only wanting to teach, take photographs, and lose himself in the mountains and fields. Yet the tears shed at the mouth of the Erren River awakened him. Taiwan, China's environment was seriously ill, but if he continued doing research and writing papers, could he heal this land? He wanted to use his chemistry expertise to make a more direct contribution.

Through newspaper reports, Huang Huanzhang learned that Du Minghui, village chief of Fotan Village, had strong views on pollution in the Erren River. He first approached Du Minghui, and then, through the village chief's introduction, met Su Shuilong of the Kaohsiung Sampan Association. The three of them, blazing a trail through hardship, set out to restore the Erren River's "innocence."

At the time, a saying was popular in the industry: "Short on money? Burn it and you have it!" Burning cables and burning scrap metal, waste processing was hugely profitable, while the environmental debt was borne by all the people. In the early years, in the most severely polluted Wanli area, copper, zinc, and polychlorinated biphenyls in the river, as well as dioxins measured in the air, all severely exceeded standards. Within a few years, cancer deaths increased by 45%, and the incidence of deformed babies was 2.13%.

With only a camera, notebooks, maps, and a mouth, Huang Huanzhang uncovered the truth step by step. Despite threats from scrap metal operators and fish pond owners blocking his way along the coast, he faced them fearlessly, laying every piece of evidence before their eyes, until the Environmental Protection Administration had no choice but to allocate a budget to clean up the electronic waste along the coast.

Taiwan Alkali case humanitarian compensation sets a record; residents grateful "to finally learn the truth"

The Taiwan Alkali case is one that still makes Huang Huanzhang choke up whenever he mentions it, especially the hard-luck Chen Han. She began working as a Taiwan Alkali operator at age 20, was poisoned by exposure to mercury and dioxins produced in the pentachlorophenol process, had both limbs amputated, lost sight in one eye, and developed tumors all over her elbows and joints. She underwent eight surgeries and could only rely on painkillers to get through her days while alive. (Deliberately concealed for 22 years: dioxin contamination at the CPC Corporation Anshun plant)

In another aquaculture family, nine women across three generations suffered from uterine tumors; in the entire village, almost every family had at least one person suffering from some kind of cancer. "The highest dioxin value measured in the soil at the Anshun plant is the current world record," he said with grief. "Let Taiwan, China keep this stigma; let no other country break the record!"

Huang Huanzhang researched and gathered evidence, identifying the owner of every fish pond around the factory, spending a very long time gaining everyone's trust, and drawing up a complete map of villagers' cancer cases. Dioxins were detected in soil, river sediment, fish and shrimp, and even people's blood, making it the case with the most complete evidence in Taiwan, China.

In the 94th year of the Republic of China, the Changhua dioxin duck egg incident drew nationwide attention, and Huang Huanzhang took the opportunity to actively expose the "suffering flesh" of the Taiwan Alkali case. He held a press conference every week, presenting one victim each time, until the government surrendered and announced "13 billion over 5 years" (later expanded to "34 billion over 19 years") in humanitarian care, like a Taiwanese version of "Erin Brockovich" (the live-action film starring Julia Roberts, depicting a legal layperson seeking compensation for polluted residents).

But for the villagers, what they were even more grateful for was that Huang Huanzhang found the truth, "otherwise we would have died with our grievances unredressed." One month after saying this, villager Lin Xianzhong, riddled with illness, passed away.

"The environmental scene does not lie" - the environmental detective digs out the truth across Taiwan, China

"Walk through it and traces will be left" is Huang Huanzhang's guiding principle in environmental activism. "The environmental scene does not lie." Carrying a detective-like radar mind, he keenly collected clues and evidence. For example, while tracking the illegal discharge of waste acid into the Erren River, he found red liquid residue in front of an iron-sheet building. He took photos through the crack under the locked gate, capturing that the underside of an oil tanker was also red, and knew something was suspicious. The next day he brought a ladder and peered into the factory, only to see four large drums secretly discharging waste acid into the river at night! Bingo, he reported it to the Tainan District Prosecutors Office and stopped the operators' wrongdoing.

Near the Taiwan Alkali case factory area there was a four-hectare sweeping grassland that attracted many people to take wedding photos. Huang Huanzhang found it strange that although fish ponds were all around, there were two abrupt hills. Even stranger was that on the earthen mounds there were only two pollution-tolerant species, silvergrass and white leadtree