City takes hard stand on garbage

The Taipei City Government yesterday approved a bylaw mandating those who commission private garbage collection companies to collect their domestic waste to separate recyclables from regular garbage or otherwise face fines of up to NT$4,500.

The bylaw is the materialization of a request made by city councilors last December as one of the provisions of the approved budget for the Bureau of Environmental Protection (環保局).

Although the city is to implement the measure on March 1, violators will receive warning tickets during the month of March, and later face fines of between NT$1,200 and NT$4,500 starting April 1.

"We've obtained the list of those who pay a fee to hire professional garbage collection companies to collect their domestic waste, and will begin an intensive promotion campaign in March to inform the public of the new policy before the city officially implements the law in April," said Stephen Shen (沈世宏), director of the environmental protection bureau, after the weekly closed-door city affairs meeting yesterday.

In addition to issuing tickets, Shen said, the city will also make public, on the Internet, the names of violators.

Since the city implemented its pay-per-bag trash collection policy on July 1 last year, some companies, schools and residents of apartment buildings have reached agreements with professional garbage collection companies to dispose of their waste without bothering to separate recyclables from regular garbage or use standardized garbage bags.

Yang Su-er (楊素娥), secretary-general of the bureau, said that the bureau will dispatch more people to make sure that the measure is properly implemented.

"We've asked the cleaning squads in each of the city's districts to conduct regular and random spot checks on garbage trucks, landfills, incinerators and recycling centers to make sure that the garbage sent to those facilities is well separated," she said.

One academic said that although the city's intentions were good, the municipal government seems to be going too far.

"I don't think that it's right to intimidate the public with [threats of] fines after it has been doing such a good job in cooperating with the city government's policy," said Lo Shang-lien (駱尚廉), director of the Graduate Institute of Environmental Engineering (環境工程學研究所) at National Taiwan University.

He said that the city residents should receive more encouragement instead of threats of punishment.

"It's the city government which should be thinking twice, especially on how to handle the overwhelming number of recyclables, which are well separated by city residents but eventually end up in landfills or incinera-tors," he said.

Lo said that it makes more sense to simplify instructions to the public for separating their garbage.

"For example, you can ask city residents to separate combustibles, non-combustibles and recyclables and non-recyclables, but it creates a lot of trouble when you ask them to separate recyclables into five different categories and to have them collected on particular days of the week," he said.

Since it is somewhat inconvenient to dispose of the garbage, some families, schools and companies prefer to pay and hire professional garbage collection firms to do the job of collecting their waste, Lo said.

"Besides, I suspect that some collection companies may have made under-the-table deals with the city government to enable them not only to profit from garbage collection. But also to use municipal landfills and incinerators without having to use standardized bags or separate recyclables from regular garbage," he said.