Taipei revealed plans to build its first biogas plant, which is expected to process 200 tonnes of leftovers daily and generate enough electricity to supply 6,000 households, city officials said.
Of the 180 tonnes of food waste processed daily in the capital, about 20 tonnes are sold as feed to pig farms, with the rest turned into fertilizer at the city’s three trash incineration plants, the city government’s Department of Environmental Protection said.
Outsourcing recyclable leftovers that exceed the department’s capacity is extremely difficult, because there are few qualified private compost facilities with sufficient capacity in northern Taiwan, department officials said, adding that the difficulty, alongside public concerns about odors released by private recyclers, helped prompt the biogas plant proposal.
Taipei Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Liou Ming-lone (劉銘龍) said the city had gone through two waste-management revolutions — the opening of the Neihu Refuse Incineration Plant in 1992, and the implementation of the per-bag trash-collection fee policy in 2000, which reduced household waste by 66.7 percent, with the recycling rate reaching 56.38 percent.
Expected to produce 10 million kilowatt-hours of power and prevent a total of 5,320 tonnes of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere every year, the proposed biogas plant would revolutionize the city’s waste management again, Liou said.
Hong Kong recycles a total of 3,600 tonnes of food waste every day and is planning to build five organic recycling facilities to replace its traditional landfills, Liou said, adding that the department had consulted Hong Kong’s environmental authorities about the proposed plant.
The department plans to launch a non-governmental agency to evaluate potential plant sites and the project’s efficiency and financial viability, Liou said.
The construction of the biogas generator is scheduled to begin in 2017 and finish in 2020, Liou said, without revealing possible sites for the plant.
Tropical Storm Nari is not a threat to Taiwan, based on its positioning and trajectory, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Nari has strengthened from a tropical depression that was positioned south of Japan, it said. The eye of the storm is about 2,100km east of Taipei, with a north-northeast trajectory moving toward the eastern seaboard of Japan, CWA data showed. Based on its current path, the storm would not affect Taiwan, the agency said.
The Taipei Department of Health’s latest inspection of fresh fruit and vegetables sold in local markets revealed a 25 percent failure rate, with most contraventions involving excessive pesticide residues, while two durians were also found to contain heavy metal cadmium at levels exceeding safety limits. Health Food and Drug Division Director Lin Kuan-chen (林冠蓁) yesterday said the agency routinely conducts inspections of fresh produce sold at traditional markets, supermarkets, hypermarkets, retail outlets and restaurants, testing for pesticide residues and other harmful substances. In its most recent inspection, conducted in May, the department randomly collected 52 samples from various locations, with testing showing
Taipei and other northern cities are to host air-raid drills from 1:30pm to 2pm tomorrow as part of urban resilience drills held alongside the Han Kuang exercises, Taiwan’s largest annual military exercises. Taipei, New Taipei City, Keelung, Taoyuan, Yilan County, Hsinchu City and Hsinchu County are to hold the annual Wanan air defense exercise tomorrow, following similar drills held in central and southern Taiwan yesterday and today respectively. The Taipei Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) and Maokong Gondola are to run as usual, although stations and passenger parking lots would have an “entry only, no exit” policy once air raid sirens sound, Taipei
Taiwan is bracing for a political shake-up as a majority of directly elected lawmakers from the main opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) face the prospect of early removal from office in an unprecedented wave of recall votes slated for July 26 and Aug. 23. The outcome of the public votes targeting 26 KMT lawmakers in the next two months — and potentially five more at later dates — could upend the power structure in the legislature, where the KMT and the smaller Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) currently hold a combined majority. After denying direct involvement in the recall campaigns for months, the
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