In light of the snowballing tainted oil controversy, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) yesterday demanded that local environmental protection agencies list non-industrial-waste cooking oil and domestic-waste cooking oil as items to be recycled, and that relevant agencies report to the EPA daily on the amount of oil recycled and by what measures it is processed.
The EPA’s Department of Waste Management reached the conclusion that it should monitor waste oil from households, restaurants, schools and night market vendors following a meeting yesterday with environmental protection officials from local governments.
Department of Waste Management Director-General Wu Tien-chi (吳天基) said during the meeting that all waste food oil is to be declared with a non-industrial waste management system, which the EPA aims to establish in December.
The Industrial Waste Management System is to be incorporated into the new system to make for a more convenient declaration platform, he added.
Furthermore, starting from next Monday, local environmental protection agencies should report results of their inspections of waste food oil to the EPA on a daily basis, including the number of businesses inspected, the process by which waste oil is generated, and how it is handed to recyclers, the meeting concluded.
All reports are to be filed by fax before the aforementioned declaration system is finished, the participants concluded.
To more effectively manage the approximately 3,600 waste oil recyclers across the nation, Wu proposed that a contract be inked between recyclers and restaurants and other food vendors. In preparation for the mechanism, the EPA is to devise a preliminary format of the contract and make a list of licensed waste oil recyclers.
According to Wu, the number of recyclers required by the EPA to declare how their waste oil is processed is about 997. Through this mechanism, he hopes to conduct a census on all waste oil recyclers across the nation and track at least 80 percent of how the nation’s waste food oil is used, recycled, processed and reused by businesses.
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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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