Rock oysters growing along the nation’s west coast have been found to contain alarming levels of heavy metals, with the highest concentration of the toxic substances detected in molluscs from Taoyuan County, environmental groups and legislators said yesterday.
The findings came from a survey of rock oysters conducted by the groups and initiated by environmental activist Huang Chun-nan (黃俊男).
Huang said he first realized there might be a problem when he was collecting data on the nation’s western coastline and noticed a large number of abnormally colored wild rock oysters, prompting him to launch the survey with the help of the groups and a professor.
Photo: Chang Chia-ming, Taipei Times
The surveyors collected 20 to 30 wild rock oysters from 42 river mouths along the west coast, but due to budget constraints could only send samples from 14 locations for testing.
Intertek Testing Services analyzed the samples for the presence of 12 types of heavy metals, in line with the Food and Drug Administration’s standard testing method, and the results showed that the rock oysters collected near Taoyuan’s Dayuan (大園) industrial park had the highest levels of lead, copper, zinc and iron among the molluscs tested, as well as the second or third-highest concentrations of nickel, cadmium, mercury and gallium.
Rock oysters taken from the county’s Yongan (永安) Fishing Harbor contained the highest amounts of mercury and gallium, as well as the second or third-highest levels of seven other types of heavy metals.
National Taiwan University Institute of Occupational Medicine and Industrial Hygiene professor Wu Kuen-yuh (吳焜裕) said the mollusc samples from Dayuan industrial park had about 1.4 times as much copper and 2.45 times as much zinc as the infamous “green oysters” found in Hsinchu City’s Hsiangshan (香山) in 1998. Those molluscs’ arresting coloring was the result of the copper wastewater discharged in rivers by the electronics industry.
Taiwan Watch Institute secretary-general Herlin Hsieh (謝和霖) said that based on the WHO and the Food and Agriculture Organization’s acceptable daily intake of heavy metals, and used by the US and Canada to calculate the health risks of eating wild rock oysters, only the oysters inhabiting the mouth of the Tsengwen River (曾文溪) in Greater Tainan can be eaten.
The daily intake guidelines are based on a person weighing about 60kg eating 50g of the oysters a day.
Wu said that nine of the locations that the groups took oysters from were near the Environmental Protection Administration’s river water quality monitoring stations, which he said was puzzling because nearly all the heavy metals tests carried out by the stations over the past decade found the toxicity levels of the water in these areas to be acceptable, but the survey results showed that about 93 percent of the molluscs the groups took from those sites were inedible.
He said one possible explanation is that the agency tests the water only once per season and heavy metals can easily be diluted or swept into the ocean, but those that do not, can accumulate in the bottom layers of mud in a body of water, thereby contaminating the aquatic animals that live there.
Taoyuan Local Union representative Pan Chung-cheng (潘忠政) said wild rock oysters may not be a popular food nationwide, but they are still widely consumed among residents of coastal areas.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Lin Shu-fen (林淑芬) said she has suggested amending related laws and setting up comprehensive quantity controls, because although an individual company’s wastewater output may be acceptable under current laws, the accumulation of toxic substances generated by the firms may exceed the capacity of the body of water it is being discharged into.
The groups urged the central and local governments to act to solve the serious water pollution along the western coast caused by the industrial sector, and in the meantime, erect signs to inform the public not to dig up clams or oysters in heavily polluted areas.
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