July is Penghu County’s peak tourist month, which means it is also the peak time for garbage. Penghu County Commissioner Lai Feng-wei (賴峰偉), who took office again a little more than half a year ago after serving two terms as Penghu commissioner from 1997 to 2005, chose this time to say that planning and building a garbage incinerator is the most important target that he hopes to achieve during his time in office.
What sense would it make to seek re-election if he were to not achieve this goal?
Leaving that aside, the incinerator issue has become something of an article of faith in Penghu, as if the island county would face a gloomy future without one.
However, it is precisely the absence of an incinerator that has preserved Penghu’s clear blue skies up until now.
Ishigaki Island in Japan’s Okinawa Prefecture has a population of about 45,000, compared with about 105,000 in Penghu, and the situations faced by the two places have much in common.
A garbage incinerator went into operation on Ishigaki about 22 years ago, but it ran into problems when it came to disposing of its waste in landfills, as well as the financial burden and difficulty of maintaining an incinerator on an outlying island.
These issues forced the local authorities to convene a policy response committee, which last year resolved to send the garbage elsewhere.
Even though environmental consciousness is more advanced in Japan — in Kamikatsu, which has a target of “zero waste,” recycling rates were about 80 percent of the 286 tonnes of waste it produced in 2017, far more than the national average of 20 percent — even in that nation, policymakers are still trying to figure out what do with garbage and they understand that incinerators are not the only solution.
However, in Penghu, garbage is generally sorted into two categories: recyclable and non-recyclable. At most, an additional pail is provided to collect kitchen waste.
This rudimentary sorting leads to a relatively small proportion of garbage being recyclable.
Moreover, the heat generated from burnable garbage is unstable as the material that goes into incinerators varies, which leads to incineration difficulties.
People often raise doubts about the results of emissions inspections at garbage incinerators in Taiwan, but the reason is not entirely to do with technical issues. Uncertainty about the recycling movement is another factor that adversely affects the overall aim of “garbage in, no emissions out.”
My experience of working at garbage incinerators in Japan tells me that excess emissions often occur suddenly and unpredictably.
Excess emissions are a common occurrence, even in Japan, and the same could be expected in Penghu, but the county government is still shouting about building an incinerator.
Ideally, garbage sorting aims to achieve zero waste. Effective use of the resources that can be extracted from garbage would make it possible to put environmental protection into practice, which would help to preserve the natural beauty of Penghu and solve the garbage problem.
If the authorities build an incinerator in Penghu without due consideration for its quality and the environmental damage that it could cause, the rainbows our children see in the future might really be the colors spewed out of the incinerator’s chimneys.
Chueng Tsun-wai teaches Japanese in Penghu and was previously a waste disposal engineer in Japan.
Translated by Julian Clegg
The EU’s biggest banks have spent years quietly creating a new way to pay that could finally allow customers to ditch their Visa Inc and Mastercard Inc cards — the latest sign that the region is looking to dislodge two of the most valuable financial firms on the planet. Wero, as the project is known, is now rolling out across much of western Europe. Backed by 16 major banks and payment processors including BNP Paribas SA, Deutsche Bank AG and Worldline SA, the platform would eventually allow a German customer to instantly settle up with, say, a hotel in France
On August 6, Ukraine crossed its northeastern border and invaded the Russian region of Kursk. After spending more than two years seeking to oust Russian forces from its own territory, Kiev turned the tables on Moscow. Vladimir Putin seemed thrown off guard. In a televised meeting about the incursion, Putin came across as patently not in control of events. The reasons for the Ukrainian offensive remain unclear. It could be an attempt to wear away at the morale of both Russia’s military and its populace, and to boost morale in Ukraine; to undermine popular and elite confidence in Putin’s rule; to
A traffic accident in Taichung — a city bus on Sept. 22 hit two Tunghai University students on a pedestrian crossing, killing one and injuring the other — has once again brought up the issue of Taiwan being a “living hell for pedestrians” and large vehicle safety to public attention. A deadly traffic accident in Taichung on Dec. 27, 2022, when a city bus hit a foreign national, his Taiwanese wife and their one-year-old son in a stroller on a pedestrian crossing, killing the wife and son, had shocked the public, leading to discussions and traffic law amendments. However, just after the
The international community was shocked when Israel was accused of launching an attack on Lebanon by rigging pagers to explode. Most media reports in Taiwan focused on whether the pagers were produced locally, arousing public concern. However, Taiwanese should also look at the matter from a security and national defense perspective. Lebanon has eschewed technology, partly because of concerns that countries would penetrate its telecommunications networks to steal confidential information or launch cyberattacks. It has largely abandoned smartphones and modern telecommunications systems, replacing them with older and relatively basic communications equipment. However, the incident shows that using older technology alone cannot
RSS