Environmental Protection Admin-istration (EPA) officials were busy yesterday inspecting government-operated restaurants to make sure they were complying with a new policy banning the use of disposable utensils and food containers.
The new policy affects government-operated grocery stores, restaurants in government buildings, public and private schools and the military and is part of a long-term program to reduce the amount of non-recyclable waste produced every day in Taiwan.
The program is being introduced gradually. The first stage was launched on July 1, when all government-run stores were banned from providing plastic shopping bags for free to customers. The ban on disposable utensils and food containers was supposed to begin in July as well, but implementation was delayed for three months because of the drought in northern Taiwan.
Yesterday, officials from all local environmental bureaus were busy inspecting restaurants affected by the new ban. Only one of 230 restaurants checked was still using disposable plastic utensils.
At a press conference yesterday EPA officials said that they would inspect about 3,000 out of 7,739 affected places this week and issue warnings to violators.
"Beginning Oct. 8, retailers not in compliance will be fined between NT$60,000 and NT$300,000," EPA Administrator Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) said yesterday during an inspection of restaurants at National Taiwan University.
EPA officials say they are proud of the effectiveness of the ban on free plastic shopping bags, noting that only five reports of violations were received after more than 11,000 places nationwide were
inspected.
A survey carried out in late August indicated that consumers patronizing outlets affected by the ban used 98.1 percent fewer plastic shopping bags than they did before the policy was implemented.
According to the EPA, the ban on providing free plastic shopping bags and disposable utensils and food containers would be widened next year to include all stores and restaurants, with the exception of street vendors.
Environmentalists, however, bashed the agency and its waste-reduction policy yesterday, saying the policy has neither changed the public's habit of discarding usable plastic bags nor reduced the amount of waste produced.
Eric Liou (劉銘龍), secretary-general of the Environmental Quality Protection Foundation (環境品質文教基金會), asked why the ban on plastic shopping bags did not apply to traditional markets, street vendors and night markets, where the use of such bags was widespread.
Liou also said that replacing plastic restaurant utensils with paper ones would actually increase the amount of waste produced.
The plastics industry is also unhappy with the EPA's program and says it will soon launch a new wave of protests against the agency to highlight what it says are hidden contradictions in the new policy.
Representatives of the plastic industry have communicated with the EPA a dozen times this year about the new policy, but their suggestions were all rejected by the agency. At public hearings held at the Legislative Yuan, industry representatives said that paper products actually consumed more energy than plastic ones based on life-cycle assessment.
At yesterday's news conference Chen Hsiung-wen (陳雄文), director-general of the EPA's Bureau of Solid Waste Management, said that the cost of replacing disposable utensils and containers with paper ones could be cut if there were businesses that provided a washing service for reusable utensils.
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