Plastics recycling plant went up. About 30 units (!), though I probably didn’t see all of them because many were apparently being held in reserve, tucked away in trees.
I’d noticed that the plant didn’t seem to be operating so much (there’s a fairly noisy shredder/conveyor thingy so you can tell) and material had accumulated on site and “overflowed” into neighbouring fields, mostly either baled, or in builders bags. I assumed the price of the product must have dropped, and I suppose arson might be a possibility.
Grandstand view from the dorm block (no camera unfortunately) and I watched firepersons in full breathing apparatus apparently working on top of hills composed of recently burning builders bags full of plastic waste, originally stacked 3 or 4 deep. Seemed unecessarily brave to me, in the absence of any real immediate threat to life or property, and in my inexpert view their officers need a sharp kick up their collective arse. The plant’s gone, and there’s nothing else close apart from a mobile phone relay aerial across the road.
Later they got tracked backhoe’s in (which seem abundant in Taiwan) to scrape the piles apart, which kept re-igniting and being hosed down again. Its gradually dying down as I type.
I had to walk under the plume (which looked to be coming down in Tainan city, where the air quality must have been pretty poor this morning) to get my breakfast, and took an industrial cartridge-type toxic-gas mask with me as a precaution against the impending rain and the firefighting efforts bringing the plume down into Datan village, though I didn’t use it. This seemed to amuse the Taiwanese a lot. I “think too much”, probably.
