Jhubei (竹北) Mayor Ho Kan-ming (何淦銘) has pledged NT$120 million (US$4 million) to clean a landfill site in his Hsinchu County city after residents voiced sanitation concerns.
The central government has offered NT$84 million and the county government has budgeted NT$36 million for the project, the Jhubei Environmental Protection Bureau said.
The county is to hold a public meeting to explain the project and, if it is approved, the project is to be open to tender, the bureau said.
Jhubei City councilors Chen Su-tsen (陳素珍), Chung Guo-chang (鍾國章) and Tseng Chin-ching (曾金清) said that residents have complained about the swelling and messy landfill in the past month.
The landfill sites in Jhubei and Sinfong Township (新豐) were not properly disinfected and if the wind blows in a westerly direction, the garbage can be smelt, the three councilors said, adding that the smell would likely be worse in summer.
Jhubei garbage collection section head Wang Kuei-sheng (王貴生) said that since a waste incinerator in Hsinchu has stopped operating, the trash in Jhubei and Sinfong had increased to more than 4,500 tonnes.
The landfill covers more than 2 hectares, and in the past two decades more than 70,000 tonnes of trash has been buried on the site, far beyond its default capacity, the bureau said.
About 30 percent to 40 percent of the trash could be re-sorted, recycled or burned, while the rest could be buried, the bureau said.
Due to its location in a military restricted zone, the landfill was confined, the bureau said, adding that after the cleaning project there would be more space, 40 percent of which would be given to the central government and the rest to the county government to store nonflammable trash or natural disaster debris.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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