Taipei revealed plans to build its first biogas plant, which is expected to process 200 tonnes of leftovers daily and generate enough electricity to supply 6,000 households, city officials said.
Of the 180 tonnes of food waste processed daily in the capital, about 20 tonnes are sold as feed to pig farms, with the rest turned into fertilizer at the city’s three trash incineration plants, the city government’s Department of Environmental Protection said.
Outsourcing recyclable leftovers that exceed the department’s capacity is extremely difficult, because there are few qualified private compost facilities with sufficient capacity in northern Taiwan, department officials said, adding that the difficulty, alongside public concerns about odors released by private recyclers, helped prompt the biogas plant proposal.
Taipei Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Liou Ming-lone (劉銘龍) said the city had gone through two waste-management revolutions — the opening of the Neihu Refuse Incineration Plant in 1992, and the implementation of the per-bag trash-collection fee policy in 2000, which reduced household waste by 66.7 percent, with the recycling rate reaching 56.38 percent.
Expected to produce 10 million kilowatt-hours of power and prevent a total of 5,320 tonnes of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere every year, the proposed biogas plant would revolutionize the city’s waste management again, Liou said.
Hong Kong recycles a total of 3,600 tonnes of food waste every day and is planning to build five organic recycling facilities to replace its traditional landfills, Liou said, adding that the department had consulted Hong Kong’s environmental authorities about the proposed plant.
The department plans to launch a non-governmental agency to evaluate potential plant sites and the project’s efficiency and financial viability, Liou said.
The construction of the biogas generator is scheduled to begin in 2017 and finish in 2020, Liou said, without revealing possible sites for the plant.
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