A Pingtung County policy that allows fishers to exchange maritime debris for local agricultural products has, over the past two months, recovered 3.7 tonnes, exceeding the amount of waste recycled by the Ocean Conservation Administration’s environmental protection fleet program.
The program worked with the Bureau of Agriculture and the Coast Guard Administration’s fifth and sixth coast guard teams, Pingtung Environmental Protection Bureau Director-General Yan Hsing-yuan (顏幸苑) said.
The teams established recycling stations at all 23 ports in the county and encouraged fishers to collect any marine waste they found — such as discarded fishing nets, plastic materials or beverage cans — to exchange for local produce.
Photo: Chen Yen-ting, Taipei Times
The local government translated information about the program into Bahasa Indonesia, English, Thai, Malay, Tagalog and Vietnamese to encourage participation from foreign workers on fishing vessels, Yan said, adding that the effort bolstered the program’s success.
Pingtung County Commissioner Pan Men-an (潘孟安) on Tuesday visited the coast guard teams to present them with cash rewards and other awards for helping with the program.
The first of its kind in Taiwan, the program promotes conservation of maritime ecology, as well as helping to meet sustainability goals, Pan said.
“We hope that by removing maritime debris, we will prevent sea turtles from being trapped in abandoned fishing nets,” he added.
The environmental fleet program includes about 3,700 fishing vessels, all of which are overseen by the ocean administration and the Fisheries Agency in their efforts to gather maritime waste that is spotted while at sea.
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