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Incinerators designed and built by Ebara Corporation to cease
operation after found contaminating Hikiji River in Fujisawa, Kanagawa
for the past seven years
Press Statement
by Ronnie Liu Tian Khiew
(Petaling Jaya,
Wednesday):
According to a news report in the Akahata Newspaper dated 2 April
2000, Ebara Corporation was ordered by the local government to stop
operating its incinerators because they were found contaminating the Hikiji
River with discharge containing high level of dioxin and other toxic
materials for the past seven years.
The report stated that the Hikiji River in Fujisawa, Kanagawa was
contaminated with an extremely high level of dioxin- 8,100 times higher than
the permissible safe level approved by the Japanese authority.
Ebara Corp. is the Japanese company awarded with the contract to design and
build the controversial RM1.5 billion gassification-type incinerator for
Malaysia.
In my statement dated 26 May 2003, I have called on Datuk Seri Ong Ka Ting,
the Minister of Housing and Local Government to terminate the contract given
to Ebara in order to safeguard Malaysians' interest, as Ebara is not
in a good and sound position to design and build the world largest
incinerator in Broga/ Semenyih.
According to a report dated April 30th by Nikkei Industrial News, Ebara
Corporation has recently retrenched about 400 people out of 1,800 from its
engineering division due to poor technology and wrong estimates on building
cost.
The company lost about 27 billion yen (US$ 225 million) last year largely
due to the failure of gassification-type incinerators. The cost of
construction estimated by Ebara was found much lower than the actual cost.
The actual cost was found to be very much higher simply because the company
could not run the plant smoothly.
The double jeopardy arises when the new technology used by Ebara turned out
to be very problematic. Ebara has to spend a lot of extra money to fix the
problem. In last January, the extra budget was estimated at 7.5 billion yen
(US$62.5 million).
The same report says that Ebara has spent 6.8 billion yen (US$56.7 million)
to fix the plants built in 2002, and it will certainly need more money to
fix the plants built this year. Ebara has estimated the building cost of
incinerators for 2002 at 73 billion yen, but it has spent about 90 billion
to build those plants.
Those who watched the program "Japan Today" over ASTRO would also know that
Japanese are now calling their government to close down all incinerators due
to serious environmental problems.
Another incinerator builder Mitsui Engineering and Shipbuilding Co. was sued
by its former workers of an incinerator in Osaka Prefecture. They also sued
the Central and local governments, demanding compensation for damaged
health.
Many other incinerator operators were slapped with summonses because of
causing damage to the environment. Many farmers and fishermen have been
claiming compensation from the authorities because the discharge of dioxin
and other toxic gases and particles from incinerators have brought serious
consequences to their well being and livelihood.
Malaysians cannot afford incinerators for both safety and cost reasons. We
do not need incinerators. Neither do we need a contractor who's in deep
trouble to build incinerators for us.
(4/6/2003)
* Ronnie Liu Tian Khiew, DAP national publicity secretary
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http://dapmalaysia.org