Taiwan's incineration waste policy is being criticized by local and international experts, who say the method is wasteful and harmful to the environment.
In other countries burning waste has been supplanted by more advanced methods of waste management and an Asian Anti-incinerator Alliance (AAA) will be launched this week in Bangkok, Thailand.
Paul Connett, a US chemistry professor at Sarah Lawrence University in New York -- who has given thousands of public presentations on this issue in more than 40 countries -- said, during his visit to Taiwan last year, that the country would, by proportion, become the most reliant nation in the world on incineration of waste by 2003.
PHOTO: FILE
Presently, Taiwan has a goal of burning 90 percent of waste by the end of 2003 and as a result the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) has focused on building incinerators. According to the EPA, 21 public public incinerators will be established by the end of 2001, while another 16 private incinerators will be operational by the end of 2003.
EPA officials have told the public that burning waste is the most economic way for Taiwan to deal with its waste because of its burgeoning population and limited space for building waste landfills.
However, EPA and local government policy is beginning to encounter stiff resistance, from people who live near the plants, local and international experts.
"We [environmentalists] are very upset with this policy because more efforts should be made to recycle and reuse garbage in terms of sustainable development," said George Cheng (
"Why should we let Taiwan become a new market for those Western and Japanese incinerator builders who have a shrinking market in their own countries?" he said, adding that Taiwan should be aware of new global environmental trends, including the spread of anti-incinerator movements.
Cheng is one of seven Taiwanese activists invited to attend an international anti-incinerator meeting in Bangkok.
GLOBAL TRENDS
In order to resist Western and Japanese waste management companies who are behind much of the incinerator construction in Asia, activists are forming an international alliance in a bid to stop their countries becoming lucrative markets for these companies.
The Asian Anti-incinerator Alliance is to be launched this Wednesday, when activists of various NGOs from 11 countries in Asia get together at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand.
"The idea for the meeting is to organize a united front in Asia against incineration in a bid to come up with strategies used both internationally and locally," Von Hernandez, one of the main organizers of the meeting and also a campaigns coordinator for Greenpeace Southeast Asia, told the Taipei Times.
In addition to Asian activists, a number of progressive Western anti-incinerator activists will discuss their strategies at the conference, including Paul Connett.
"I think the Asian coalition is of extreme importance -- especially because of its tie-ins to New Zealand and Australia, which are at the cutting edge of zero waste ideas," Connett said.
Based on Connett's investigations of 42 countries, Switzerland burns most waste, at 80 percent, followed by Japan with 74 percent.
Connett said that he was shocked by Taiwan's policy, adopted from Japan, and said Taiwan's confidence in this technology (burning waste) was badly misunderstood and misled the general public.
ECO WARS
Progressive US NGOs involved in the establishment of the AAA, include the Washington-based Multinationals Resource Center (MRC), an organization providing third world workers, environmental and consumer groups and local journalists with critical information on the activities of multinational corporations.
According to MRC activists, at a global level, there is a lot of work to do on the Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs,
In recent years, there has been mounting concern and scientific interest about these chemicals.
According to Greenpeace, dioxins are a class of chemical compounds which are extremely toxic to animals and humans, and have been characterized as being some of the most potent "man-made" toxins ever studied.
Neil Tangri, an MRC activist who is also attending the launch of the AAA, said, "We as citizens need to push our governments to adopt zero tolerance of dioxin production."
Tangri claimed the biggest problem was growing cross-national exploitation in the incinerator industry.
"We killed the incinerator industry in the US only after a series of long, hard battles. However, they finally learned that trying to build an incinerator in a community is a sure way to spend many years and much money fighting against citizens' efforts to keep their communities clean, when instead they could be earning money in some other business," Tangri said.
Western anti-incinerator activists say that funding incinerator construction is a key part of the battle for cleaner air. They say that governments should be taught not to finance incinerator projects in other countries.
"Any attack on the corporate welfare system known as overseas development aid will be met with stiff resistance from the corporations that get taxpayer subsidies [for funding incinerator construction], so this is part of a much larger battle. But it is one that we need to fight," said Tangri.
UP IN SMOKE
Taiwanese anti-incinerator activists have argued that a large amount of money spent on building public large-scale incinerators -- NT$ 3.5 billion for each on average -- was provided by international consultancy companies in the industry.
"The yearly interest on the budget for building 21 public incinerators, which is about NT$210 million, could be used to promote recycling, reusing waste and securing a favorable outcome [cleaner pollution policies]," Cheng said.
He said that local anti-incinerator groups would benefit from the establishment of the AAA because of convenient channels to exchange information.
Ultimately, Tangri said, activists would show the business community that incinerators were not a profitable business, in the short or the long run.
Tangri gave the example of Japan, saying that incinerator operators in that country were having to pay billions of yen in fines because of the damage they have caused to the health of the environment, workers in the industry and people living near the plants.
According to the Japan Times on July 15, a 28-month dispute over Japan's worst case of dioxin pollution ended as residents of Nose, Osaka Prefecture, and the builders of the incinerator responsible for the contamination accepted a mediation plan by the prefecture's pollution examination committee.
It was reported that the incinerator maker, Mitsui Engineering and Shipbuilding Co -- and the subsidiary company that maintained the plant -- would pay a total of ?750 million (US$6.9 million), mainly for the cost of scrapping the incinerator and removing the contaminated soil in and around it.
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