The nation’s beaches are beset with plastic waste, most of which is food packaging, utensils and food-related items, while decades-long efforts at beach clean-ups have had a limited effect, environmental groups said as they urged the public to reduce their usage of disposable plastic products.
The Society of Wilderness on Friday last week announced the results of its beach clean-up campaigns this year, saying that 89.6 percent of the garbage collected from Taiwan’s beaches were made of plastic, and 72.4 percent were food and beverage containers or eating utensils.
The Top 10 garbage items collected were bottle caps, fishing floats, plastic bags, drinking straws, disposable eating utensils, glass bottles, plastic bottles, disposable cups, food containers and cigarette butts, the society said.
“Except for the fishing floats, all the top 10 items that are littering our beaches are everyday products, suggesting there is a huge problem of the public’s consumption behaviors and garbage management,” society president Lai Jung-hsiao (賴榮孝) said.
The society mobilized nearly 10,000 volunteers to clean up 48 beaches in 15 cities this year and they collected 36 tonnes of trash, Lai said.
There is an average 700g of garbage for every meter of beach, he said.
However, while the 290 beach cleaning events organized by the society over the past 12 years have helped the nation’s beaches become cleaner, there is still 1.8 million tonnes of garbage scattered around Taiwan’s 1,200km coastline, he said.
Ocean pollution caused by tiny bits of plastics is a major concern, as there are 2,090 plastic scraps smaller than a coin on every square meter of beach, amounting to 25 billion plastic bits being strewn about the nation’s coast, he said.
Society of Entrepreneurs and Ecology’s Taiwan branch director Cheng Ying-pin (鄭瑛彬) said the public must reduce its plastic footprint.
“Industry should cut down on its reliance on disposable plastics, replacing them with recyclable materials,” Cheng said.
The groups urged businesses to “de-plasticize” their production: companies should calculate the mass of different plastics that make up their best-selling products to select products with the highest de-plasticizing potential and then reduce the plastics used to produce the products.
They also called on the government to launch survey and monitoring projects to identify the source of ocean trash and devise solutions to cope with the ever-growing problem.
FEW REMAIN: Conservationists tried to stop the demolition, but to no avail, and the owner cannot be fined, as the structure was not listed as a historical building One of the few remaining Japanese colonial-era granaries in Taiwan was dismantled by its owner on Friday, prompting outrage from conservationists. The granary, which was at No. 16, Lane 11, Hangzhou S Rd Sec 1 in Taipei, belonged to Taiwan Takushoku Corp during the colonial era, conservationist Chang Wan-lin (張琬琳) said, adding that she and others had been collecting information to reapply to have the building protected as a historical structure. During the colonial era, the granary served the area from Monga (艋舺) to what is now Songshan District (松山) in the north, she said. “Back then the eastern part
SEEING THE POSITIVE: A majority of respondents in Taiwan said that they favored Trump because they think Taiwan-US ties would improve with him Among eight Asia-Pacific countries and regions, only Taiwan prefers US President Donald Trump over his challenger, former US vice president Joe Biden, in the upcoming US presidential election, a survey released on Thursday showed. According to the poll published by UK-based market research firm YouGov, 42 percent of Taiwanese favor Trump in the Nov. 3 election, while 30 percent back Biden and 28 percent have no opinion. In contrast, respondents in Malaysia favor Biden over Trump 62 percent to 9 percent, and in Singapore by 66 percent to 12 percent, the survey showed. Biden also led Trump in Australia (60 percent to 21
TROUBLEMAKER: The missiles, capable of striking up to 2,000km away, would likely be used to deter other nations from coming to Taiwan’s aid, a legislator said The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has reportedly deployed advanced hypersonic missiles along China’s southeast coast, which Taiwan’s missile defense system might have difficulty intercepting, an analyst said yesterday. Citing an unnamed military source, the South China Morning Post said that the missile bases on the coasts of China’s Fujian and Zhejiang provinces have been upgraded and are stocked with DF-17 missiles, equipped with hypersonic glide vehicles. “The DF-17 hypersonic missile will gradually replace the old DF-11s and DF-15s that were deployed in the southeast region for decades,” said the source, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic. “The
AIR CONTROL INCIDENT: The Hong Kong side said it ‘cannot accept this aircraft,’ ordering it to ascend to an unsafe altitude and forcing it to return to Kaohsiung The Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) on Friday disclosed a full transcript of the communications between Taiwanese and Hong Kong air traffic controllers, rebutting the latter’s claim that a Taiwanese plane had voluntarily abandoned its flight path. Hong Kong denied permission for the plane to proceed to the disputed Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島), which are claimed by both Taiwan and China, the CAA said. The incident happened on Thursday when a civil aircraft chartered by the military was advised by Hong Kong air traffic controllers to not enter the airspace over a group of islands in the South China Sea
RSS