As department stores and supermarket chains enter their annual end-of-year sales period, household postboxes are being crammed with promotional flyers and magazines. The Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) says Taiwanese businesses send an estimated 70 million advertising leaflets annually, which consumes about 3,700 tonnes of paper.
“Though the promotion materials are glossy and colorful, they do not contain any permanent information and thus all eventually become waste … Some of them may not even be opened before being thrown into the trash,” said Hsu Chi-lun (?? the EPA’s section chief at the department of solid waste control.
As a result, the EPA has negotiated with businesses to devise ways to cut down on the waste, Hsu said.
“For example, we have asked that the businesses develop a filtering system so that they do not send multiple copies of a catalogue to the same household,” Hsu said.
“In addition, the stores can give customers the option to stop receiving the materials, or offer electronic catalogues to those who sign up,” he said.
Since about 60 percent of the promotional materials are wrapped in plastic bags, resulting in about 180 tonnes of the hard-to-degrade material, the EPA also called on businesses to forgo the plastic and instead place name labels directly on the flyers or catalogues whenever possible.
“The waste reduction plans would first be proposed by the businesses themselves, and measures would begin from next year,” he said.
Citing an EPA study, Hsu said that 80 percent of people say there should be less mailed advertising and that promotional materials should use less plastic wrapping.
“By reducing the amount of packaging, stores would not only save on printing and mailing costs, but also comply with societal expectations,” he said.
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:
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