The Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) on Tuesday announced measures to promote the use of recycled plastic and hopes that by 2025 at least one-quarter of plastic containers would made of recycled plastic.
However, it said only plastic containers that are not used to store food would be held to this standard.
Plastic packaging, mostly made from polyethylene, polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate, comprises 25 percent, or 600,000 tonnes of all plastic products used in Taiwan, EPA data show.
Photo: Lo Chi, Taipei Times
The EPA is mulling a certification system that could be applied to all plastic producers in the nation, Department of Waste Management Deputy Director-General Liu Jui-hsiang (劉瑞祥) said.
Given sufficient public support, the agency could consider drafting a law to regulate and oversee recycled plastic standards, Liu added.
Alongside measures to track and certify select products made by certain brands, a certification system would ensure the quality and source of recycled plastic, Liu said.
The EPA would initially reward companies promoting the use of recycled plastic in their products by prioritizing their products for EPA projects, Liu added.
Horng En Group president Hung Che-sheng (洪哲盛) said that the company has been providing recycled plastics to foreign companies, adding that in Taiwan, the production of recycled plastic materials far exceeded demand.
“We will comply with government policies, but the domestic supply and demand model should be balanced,” Hung said.
Taiwan Plastic Industry Association deputy secretary-general Huang Lie-chi (黃烈啟) said the government should provide plastic recyclers with better benefits.
Citing companies in the US and Europe adopting the block-chain model to manage recycling processes, Huang said such a model would offer increased transparency and could be considered an option.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching