In addition to destroying many people’s homes, Typhoon Morakot washed out many wooded hillsides. At a rough estimate, floods caused by the typhoon left about 1 million tonnes of driftwood strewn along river banks or swept onto farmers’ fields.
The Council of Agriculture (COA) said the driftwood was waste material with no value and that it wanted local governments to pile it up or bury it on the spot to make way for tree planting. This is a rather unimaginative way of handling the problem.
Burning wood produces about half the heat generated by burning the same weight of coal. If there is 1 million tonnes of wood lying around — even excluding parts that cannot be cut up or are hard to burn because they contain too much mud and stones from landslides — it should still be possible to transport most of it to incinerators and burn it to generate electricity.
If the Taiwan Power Co pays US$100 for each tonne of coal it buys, then the waste driftwood left by Morakot should be able to provide Kaohsiung, Tainan, Pingtung and Taitung counties with roughly NT$1 billion (US$30.8 million) to NT$1.5 billion in revenue from power generation.
If local government estimates are correct — they say there are nearer to 5 million tonnes of driftwood — then income generated from selling the waste wood could be in the range of NT$5 billion to NT$7.5 billion.
It would be more cost effective to deliver the wood through the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) to incinerators to generate power instead of burying it as waste. Doing so would comply with Article 26 of the Post-Typhoon Morakot Reconstruction Special Act (莫拉克颱風災後重建特別條例) and with Article 8 of the Waste Disposal Act (廢棄物清理法), and would provide extra revenue for local governments.
On the other hand, if the wood is left to decompose, it may be washed out again by storms even if it is buried, which puts us back at square one and is a complete waste of public funds.
The Pingtung County Government estimates there are 500,000 tonnes of driftwood in Pingtung alone, some of it piled up to 2m. If all this wood were to be piled together, it would take up at least 100 hectares of land.
Considering the government’s financial predicament, it should think harder about how to increase revenue and cut expenditures. Burying driftwood on the spot would be a gift to those who want to collect it for their own profit, and would be economically inefficient. The Cabinet has allocated NT$190 million to the COA for clearing up the driftwood, which does not include funds provided to the Water Resources Agency.
The only solution the COA can come up with, however, is to tell local governments to pile up the driftwood or bury it.
Because of government inefficiency, the fact that plans for handling the driftwood are poorly defined and do not clearly lay out rights and responsibilities, and because manpower and equipment are not evenly distributed, people in some areas are tired of waiting for the driftwood to be cleared and have started burning it themselves, causing air pollution.
If the same budget were instead given to the EPA to burn the wood in incinerators, it would have the following advantages. First, it would generate extra revenue from electricity generation. Second, it would take advantage of the EPA’s professional experience in waste disposal to avoid causing pollution during the clean-up process. Third, the wood would be given to incinerators that have been short of trash to burn because of improved recycling, including those at Ganshan and Renwu in Kaohsiung County, Yongkang in Tainan County, Kanding in Pingtung County and those in Taitung County, to burn and keep their generators running. Fourth, it would benefit the residents of flood-stricken areas by allowing farmers to start cultivating their fields.
From this point of view, the driftwood problem is not just a crisis, but an opportunity. If handled in the right way, the wood can be cleared away quickly, cutting pollution, and can be used to generate electricity, earning money for local governments and benefiting flood-stricken areas. It really is a case of killing many birds with one stone.
The COA always sees driftwood as government property in the first instance, which is in line with Article 15 of the Forestry Act (森林法). However, driftwood that cannot be sold as timber should not be thought of as worthless.
If the COA and EPA work together, they can turn dirt into gold.
What they must avoid is a situation where, because the policies, powers and responsibilities of the two agencies are not clearly defined, gold is instead turned into dirt and taxpayers’ hard-earned money goes to waste.
Winston Dang is a former Environmental Protection Administration minister.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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