The volume of waste produced by Taipei has dropped and its volume of recyclables grown in the three days since the city implemented its new garbage collection initiative on July 1, Taipei City Government officials said yesterday.
"We've secured the beachhead, and now it's time to push inland," said Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) after the weekly closed-door city affairs meeting yesterday.
According to Stephen Shen (沈世宏), director of the city's Bureau of Environmental Protection (環保 局), the average daily trash volume over the past three days has been recorded at about 1,700 tonnes, or about 42 percent less than 1999's usual daily total.
The average rate of resource recycling over the past two days (there is no recycling on Sundays) has been 10 percent, or about four times more than the figure in 1999.
Shen said that an increasing number of people are using regulation-size bags. Of the 139,000 bags collected on July 1, only 1.3 percent were ordinary plastic shopping bags. The figure went down to 0.2 percent on July 2 and 0.1 percent on July 3.
Illegal dumping did not seem to be as serious a problem as initially feared, he said. About 2,000 bags, or 1.5 percent of the total garbage volume, were found dumped away from designated sites on July 1, while more than 1,500 bags -- or over 0.7 percent -- were found on July 2, and 2,000 bags -- or around 0.8 percent -- on July 3.
There is as yet no official data on illegal dumping in Taipei County, and since the city is itself currently short of inspectors and the county has not yet requested help, Shen said, the city and county would not be joining forces to carry out illegal dumping prevention work.
Regulation-size bags were available at stores on June 24, but some people have complained about not being able to purchase them over the past three days, despite the city's efforts in providing direct delivery services both to convenience stores and to individuals.
To solve the problem, Shen said, the city government had decided to extend the expiry date of the NT$330 discount coupons to the end of the year from the original Aug. 31.
In light of the success of the perishables recycling scheme -- for which tests began on June 5 in Neihu's Hsi-an and Hsihu boroughs, the city is considering gradually expanding it to the entire city, Shen said.
The compost processing facility in the Shanchuku landfill in Nankang is also expected to start trials in September, processing about five tonnes every month, he said.
Since the recycling is expected to reach levels beyond the capacity of the city's recycling squads, Shen said, the city hopes to let private companies start running the city-owned recyclables separation site (currently located at the Shanchuku landfill) in January of next year.
The city is also calling for the central government to make it compulsory to recycle certain items in a bid to encourage prospective commercial recycling dealers to take the initiative in processing them, he said.
While a total of about 139,000 bags was collected on July 1, over 200,000 bags and 248,000 bags were gathered on July 2 and July 3 respectively, making a daily average of 196,000 bags.
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