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Residents support new garbage fees

The majority of Taipei's residents have given a thumbs-up to the city's five-month-old "garbage fees by the bag" system, the city's Bureau of Environmental Protec-tion reported yesterday.

Quoting the results of a telephone poll of 1,080 Taipei citizens evenly selected from among the city's 12 administrative districts and conducted by Shih Hsin University from Oct. 26 to 28, the bureau said 76 percent of respondents said they recognize the "garbage fees by the bag" formula as a good policy and that enforcement of the policy had been successful so far.

The October poll marks the third time the bureau has commissioned the university to survey residents' views on the new fee collection system since its implementation in July.

According to the latest survey, 51.4 percent of the respondents, all over 18, said they feel that the system is more economical than the previous pricing formula under which monthly household garbage fees were calculated based on the amount of tap-water consumed per month. The ratio was 11.9 percent higher than the percentage recorded in the previous opinion survey.

In contrast, the percentage of people who feel that the new system is costlier than the old one declined from 36.3 percent to 32.7 percent.

Meanwhile, 51 percent of the respondents said they have deliberately reduced the amount of their household garbage since the new formula was implemented, with 27 percent of them saying their household trash has declined by more than 60 percent in the past few months.

About 55 percent said they think that the new system has achieved its goal of cutting the amount of garbage generated.

Under the new system, residents must buy specially designated garbage bags and are subject to fines if they attempt to use non-designated bags when tossing out their household waste.

A study by the municipal environmental protection bureau shows that the quantity of non-recyclable general garbage has declined by 40 percent since July, while recyclable garbage has registered a four-fold increase during the same period.

As a result, the bureau decided to stop collecting garbage on Sundays from Oct. 1, a bureau official said, adding that the latest survey results show that 80 percent of the respondents support this new six-day workweek system for municipal waste collectors.
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