Environmental Protection Ad-ministration (EPA) officials said yesterday that the garbage collection fee was lower than the government considered appropriate and urged local governments to come up with schemes to adjust the fee to reflect the real cost of waste management.
EPA officials said that many landfills for household garbage would be full in the near future. EPA officials said that local governments must raise funds for new landfills and waste incinerators.
"Local governments will encounter waste management difficulties if the fee is not raised," said Leu Horng-guang (
Local governments have different means of collecting the fee depending on the different methods of garbage collection and handling they employ. Taipei, for example, operates a per-bag trash collection fee policy (
Last year, the EPA decided that the garbage treatment fee would include the costs of collecting garbage, operating processing facilities, land exploitation and restoration, and the building of new landfills and incinerators. The regulation was to have taken effect last January but failed because of opposition by a number of local governments. The EPA is negotiating a new formula with local governments.
If the EPA's original regulation was to apply, however, in Taipei County, a NT$46 garbage collection fee would be added to the charge for each unit of tap water used, instead of the existing NT$11 additional charge. Kaohsiung County and Taichung City would respectively have to add charges of NT$36 and NT$12 per unit of water to the water fee.
It is estimated that some households would pay more than ten times what they currently pay.
Due to the current economic downturn, financial support for garbage management from the central government is not meeting the demands of local governments. Starting this year, the central government has stopped assisting local governments in their purchase of garbage trucks.
Local governments said they would not raise the garbage collection fee on short notice in order not to incur opposition from local residents. They said that adjusting the fee "gradually" would be acceptable.
They also called on the EPA to set up a uniform system of waste collection and charges as soon as possible.
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