http://dapmalaysia.org  

More bad news for Ebara Corporation casts a longer shadow over its ability to build the world's largest incinerator for Malaysia   Media Statement by Ronnie Liu Tian Khiew (Petaling Jaya, Wednesday):  The latest article published by the Industrial News daily (dated 03-06-2003,see attached press cutting) has shown that all major Japanese incinerator builders are not doing well in both sales volumes and total amount of order for last year and this year (estimate). The report shows that Ebara's sales volume was down by 22% to 152.8 billion yen last year, and it is estimated to go down by another 15% to 130 billion yen next year. Other Japanese incinerator builders who suffered losses in sales volume either last year or this year include Hitachi, Kawasaki, Takuma, Kubota, Mitsui, Sumitomo, Sin-Nittetsu and JFE. The article also says that Ebara has received the contract of the world's largest gassification plant from Malaysia, and the company is already counting the profit from the one in Malaysia. In the latest Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, Ebara faired rather badly with a weighting as low as 0.0151 as of May 31,2003. Company like Electrolux has weighting of 0.1216. The EIA report for the Broga incinerator is due to be released some time this June, but the Malaysian Government is still keeping mum on the source of funding for the RM1.5 billion incinerators. While the Ministry of Housing and Local Government has claimed that the funding of the project would come in the form of a soft loan from Japan, The Japanese Embassy in Malaysia has openly denied any involvement of the Japanese Government or its agency. The Minister of Housing and Local Government Datuk Seri Ong Ka Ting should terminate the contract given to Ebara Corporation in order to safeguard the Malaysian interest. It's illogical and scandalous to award such an important project to a company with bad records like Ebara. In some earlier reports, Ebara was ordered by the provincial 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 level (1 picogram per litre) set by the Japanese authority. 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. 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. (11/6/2003) * Ronnie Liu Tian Khiew, DAP national publicity secretary