Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators yesterday urged the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) to quickly come up with a way to dispose of scrap tires nationwide, as the weather is getting warmer and they can become breeding grounds for mosquitoes.
Vehicles are now required to have tire treads of a depth stipulated by law, meaning that over the years piles of discarded tires have built up.
However, many recycling companies are unwilling to take them anymore since regulations on air pollution tightened.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
About 120,000 tonnes of scrap tires are discarded every year, many of which are stacked up in disposal sites waiting to be recycled, but recycling companies complain of difficulties dealing with such large numbers, the agency said.
At a news conference at the legislature yesterday, DPP Legislator Liu Chien-kuo (劉建國) said the problem of such companies have been refusing to take scrap tires for more than a year and piles of tires increase the risk of mosquito-borne disease spreading as the weather gets warmer.
“About 10.8 tonnes of tires were recycled last year, but about 120,000 tonnes were discarded,” DPP Legislator Su Chiao-hui (蘇巧慧) said, adding that despite the scrap tire recycling fee tire companies must offer when they produce or import new tires, many recycling companies still refuse to take tires.
“The number of tires that are reused has been dropping in recent years,” EPA official Wu Meng-er (吳孟兒) said, vowing to make efforts to improve the nation’s waste tire reuse rate.
The EPA has been actively searching for temporary sites to store scrap tires, in addition to providing subsidies to local governments for providing temporary disposal sites, Wu said.
Rather than allocating temporary storage sites, the most important thing is to come up with a comprehensive solution for the disposal of unwanted tires, DPP Legislator Hung Chun-yi (洪宗熠) said, urging the agency to come up with a viable idea within one month.
The EPA seems to be have failed in its duty to deal with the issue, Liu said.
Liu said that if it does not find a solution soon, he would ask the Control Yuan to find who is responsible for its failure.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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