Taiwan is seeking to expand the scope of the aid it sends to its allies in the Asia-Pacific, from medical and agricultural assistance to environmental matters such as garbage disposal, Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) officials said.
Following a ministerial forum between Taiwan and its six Asia-Pacific allies in July last year, the administration assigned several teams of experts to make on-site assessments of the environmental situation in the island countries before drafting assistance plans.
Wu Yi-lin (吳奕霖), a senior environmental specialist at the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Office, said that for the people of the Pacific islands, garbage disposal appears to be a more pressing problem than rising sea levels.
“The world is focused on the problem of rising sea levels, as it is an index of global climate change, but they [the people living on the Pacific islands] think that waste disposal is a more urgent matter,” Wu said.
Most of the Pacific island countries are atolls and have little land for waste dumps, he said.
“They fear that they might be submerged — not by the sea, but by trash,” he said.
Liang Yeon-fong (梁永芳), director of the EPA International Affairs Office and one of the experts who conducted on-site assessments in the Solomon Islands, Marshall Islands, Palau and Nauru, said garbage disposal is a common worry among Taiwan’s allies in the Pacific.
The problem can have a significant impact on the economy of some countries, particularly those that depend on tourism, as tourists are usually repelled by a dirty, disorderly environment, he said.
These countries have only simple, crude waste dumps and sometimes garbage is piled up in the open, Liang said.
To deal with their waste disposal problem, those countries not only need money, but also technical assistance and training, he said.
Liang said the Solomon Islands wanted a waste incinerator, but given the technical expertise needed to maintain and operate such a facility, the administration believed this would not be a practical solution for that country.
The teams said the Solomon Islands once obtained an incinerator for medical waste, but that within three months the equipment had broken down because it was not used properly and has not been used since because of lack of funds and expertise to repair it.
Noting that most of the waste in the Pacific island countries is biodegradable material such as fruit skin and pits, Liang said collection was the main problem, as there were insufficient garbage trucks and public trash cans in those countries.
He said degradable garbage could be used as organic fertilizer, a practice that is already being used at some Taiwanese missions there.
In a report presented to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which oversees the foreign aid budget, the EPA recommended donating garbage trucks and helping with the creation of recycling systems.
The EPA has no budget for foreign aid, but can provide technical assistance and manpower to the nation’s allies. Liang called on the ministry to integrate environmental protection in its assistance program, which so far has focused on medical services and agricultural aid.
“Taiwan has expertise in waste reduction and recycling,” he said.
EPA statistics show that Taiwan’s recycling rate was 38.7 percent last year, which compares well with other developed countries.
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