In order to assess soil and groundwater qualities in the industrial parks, the Environmental Protection Administration（EPA）issued the project “Contamination Source Investigation and Mitigation Plan for Industrial Park of High Contamination Potential（Phase Ⅴ)”. This project conducted soil and groundwater investigation at 7 industrial parks, all classified as orange light industrial parks, including Shulin Industrial Park, Guanyin Industrial Park, Pingjhen Industrial Park, Guishan Industrial Park, Linkou Industrial Park Ⅲ, Hsinchu Industrial Park, and Kuanyian Industrial Park. A total of 1,505 factories in these 7 industrial parks were assessed in this project.
The investigation included three stages. At the first stage, data collections and information verifications were conducted to select factories with higher ranking for further environmental site assessments. At the second stage, questionnaire surveys and interviews with factory workers were conducted to rank factories with higher pollution potential. At the third stage, a total of 30 factories with higher pollution potential were selected for further soil and groundwater investigation in which geophysical surveys, soil sampling, well installation, and groundwater sampling were subsequently conducted.
According to the analytical results of the 30 factories, a total of 18 factories were found contaminated, including 10 factories with soil contamination, 3 factories with groundwater contamination, and 5 factories with both soil and groundwater contamination. Based on the information collected, the polluters were successfully identified for 17 of the factories. The soil contaminants included heavy metals and total petroleum hydrocarbons. The groundwater contaminants included fluorides, volatile organic compounds, nitrate-N, and heavy metals. Majority of the contaminated factories were metal manufacturing and chemical manufacturing related industries. It is noted that the common areas that found contaminated were wet processing areas, raw material storage areas, wastewater treatment plants, oil tank areas, waste storage areas, and sewage.
This project also successfully identified the source areas for nickel in KI19 in Guanyin Industrial Park, fluorides in HC07 in Hsinchu Industrial Park, and TCE in Kuanyian Industrial Park.
