Taichung City's experience in recycling leftover food shows that the nation has great potential to carry out a new policy mandating food recycling in 2006, the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) said yesterday.
Environmental Protection Administrator Chang Juu-en (
To show his appreciation to the city's garbage collectors, EPA head Chang yesterday presented Mid-Autumn Festival gifts to them.
"We hope to see more residents cooperate to recycle leftover food in the near future," Chang said.
According to city environmental officials, 1 million residents produce about 230 tonnes of leftover food daily.
Last year, the city government began turning leftover food into feed for chickens. Currently, the set of facilities run by the city government turns about 2 tonnes of leftover food into 300kg of feed daily.
"By mixing the feed with other feed ingredients, more than 2,000 chickens are raised and closely monitored by experts from National Chung Hsing University and Tunghai University," inspection spokesman Lin Tzo-hsiang (
Lin said that chickens raised in this way are healthy and will be available in local markets next year.
The EPA plans to launch a one-year trial of compulsory leftover food recycling measures in 25 jurisdictions in January.
The policy is part of an effort to ease the burden on waste incinerators. EPA officials said that Taiwan produces about 4,500 tonnes of leftover food waste daily, which accounts for 25 percent of all household waste.
According to Chang, 254 townships in 25 jurisdictions are working on food waste recycling. Currently, 900 tonnes of leftover food is recycled daily.
After the recycling of table scraps and other food waste becomes compulsory in January 2006 nationwide, the amount of leftover food recycled daily might increase to at least 1,600 tonnes the following year, the EPA said.
"We estimate that the recycling project will create about NT$2.4 billion in economic benefits annually," Chang said.
In addition to the production of chicken feed, the city government also uses recycled food waste to feed pigs and produce compost.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching