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Environmental budgets focus on waste management

The nation's expenditure for environmental protection is shared almost evenly by the government and industry, with the government handling and recycling waste while the industrial sector treats waste water and tackles air pollution, the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) said yesterday.

For future policy analysis, the EPA will adopt the definition of pollution abatement and control (PAC) created by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to obtain executive details about environmental expenditure.

According to Pong Sheng-ming (彭賢明), head of the agency's Statistics Office, the definition rules out expenditure on industrial safety, ecological preservation, natural resources management and other items.

"Details obtained from our statistics will be also used in the calculation of our Green GNP," Pong told a press conference yesterday.

Hsieh Mei-hsiu (謝美秀), a specialist in the Statistics Office, said Taiwan's environmental expenditure in 2002 -- NT$115.7 billion -- included NT$52.1 billion from the government and the industry's NT$63.6 billion.

Statistics show that 65 percent of the government's money for environmental protection, or NT$34 billion, is spent on household waste management tasks conducted by local authorities. Most of the money is used to pay the salaries of sanitation workers and maintenance fees for landfills and waste incinerators. About half of the money, NT$21.3 billion, is shared by the governments of Taipei County, Taipei City and Kaohsiung City.

The statistics show that the government spent NT$9.5 billion less in 2002 than in 2001.

"The cut of more than NT$3 billion for sewer construction in Taipei City meant the country invested NT$5.6 billion less as a whole on water pollution prevention than in 2001," Hsieh said.

The completion of a waste incinerator in Changhua County also helped the government spend NT$4.3 billion less in 2002 than it did the year before.

EPA officials said, however, that a recent survey on residents' feeling about environmental quality suggests that respondents' responses did not match the investment in a variety of areas.

Taking air quality as an example, the officials said that the investment on related fields had been increased and records of air-quality indicators suggest that the situation in 2002 was better than that in 2001. However, the survey found that 59 percent of the respondents did not think air quality had improved.

In terms of waste management, the expenditure on related fields was reduced in 2002. But 80 percent of responsdents believe that the government's waste management had improved that year.
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