Taipei City scales back ambitions for organic waste

Instead of launching an organic waste collection scheme for all of Taipei City as originally planned, the Taipei City Government yesterday decided to instead expand its trial scheme from 17 boroughs to 51.

The city's organic waste accounts for 30 to 40 percent of all garbage generated per household, and 80 to 90 percent of that disposed of by public and private markets, according to statistics.

James Shieh (謝世傑), chief of the third division of the city's Bureau of Environmental Protection (環保局), said that before the city is able to set up the compost facility at the Shanchuku (山豬窟) landfill site in Nankang district, implementing the scheme for the entire metropolitan area will be problematic.

"The city is not capable of handling organic waste until the compost facility is complete," Shieh said, adding that all of the organic waste that the city collected now ends up in normal incinerators just like regular garbage.

Currently, about 90 percent of the city's refuse goes to the city's three incinerators in the Peitou, Neihu and Mucha districts, while the remaining 10 percent goes to the Shanchuku landfill.

As the Shanchuku landfill is expected to be full by June 2004, the city council approved during its last session the location of the third landfill at Neikou (內溝) in the Neihu District. The 60-hectare (600,000m2) site is slated to become operational in 2005.

Even with the completion of the compost facility, which is scheduled to be operational in July, the city will still face difficulties in handling organic waste since the daily processing capacity of the facility is 30 tonnes, while the city creates about 500 tonnes of organic waste per day.

Although Formosa Plastics Group has expressed an interest in becoming involved in the collection scheme, the city and the company are still in the process of hammering out details on a collaboration.

Originally the city had planned to expand the organic waste collection scheme to the entire city on April 1. That outcome, however, failed to materialize after running into stiff opposition from some environmental protection groups.

The Green Citizens' Action Alliance (綠色公民行動聯盟) is one of them.

Chen Chien-chih (陳建志), convener of the organization's garbage policy team, said that the alliance opposed the plan for a legitimate reason.

"Don't get us wrong. We're not against the idea of recycling organic waste, which we think is a very good one. The core problem is that the city should have formulated the rules of the game before it invited the public to play," he said.

Yesterday marked the third of the planned stages in the trial scheme. On June 5 last year, Taipei city commissioned the Homemakers' Union and Foundation (主婦聯盟) to implement the scheme in Neihu District's two boroughs of Hsian (西安里) and Hsihu (西湖里), involving 5,000 households.

The scheme was further expanded on Sept. 1 of last year to cover 17 boroughs spread across the city's 12 districts.

Residents living in the 51 trial boroughs do not need to use standardized bags to dispose of their kitchen scraps. They can discard them along with regular garbage in garbage trucks from Mondays to Saturdays.