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進入《TAIPEI TIMES 焦點》 Regional management, industrial waste treatment critical to garbage issue: EPA
By Chen Wei-han / Staff reporter
The Environmental Protection Administration （EPA） yesterday proposed to solve a growing garbage crisis by improving regional waste management, establishing industrial waste treatment centers and building more incinerators, while legislators said that a refusal by local governments to accept garbage from other municipalities is the source of the issue.
The agency has divided the nation into five cross-municipal waste management regions to process garbage by area, allowing for the activation of cross-region waste treatment if one region’s capacity becomes overextended, EPA Minister Wei Kuo-yen （魏國彥） said at a question-and-answer session at a meeting of the legislature’s Social Welfare and Environmental Hygiene Committee.
The EPA plans to build advanced incinerators to replace older facilities and urged Yunlin and Taitung counties to put two plants that remain idle into operation to boost capacity, Wei said.
The EPA also plans to establish industrial waste treatment centers and a unified pricing mechanism for local governments to ease the garbage crisis in central and southern municipalities, Wei said.
Yunlin County Commissioner Lee Chin-yung （李進勇） of the Democratic Progressive Party （DPP） said that the county government is unable to put an incinerator in Linnei Township （林內） into use due to a 2010 Supreme Administrative Court ruling that invalidated the facility’s environmental impact assessment.
“The plant was the product of administrative failure and collusion between the government and businesses, and it has sparked heated protests as it was built near a water reserve area,” Lee said, adding that the county government was not to blame for the garbage crisis.
There are more than 20,000 tonnes of trash piled up in Yunlin, as the county can only process 60 tonnes out of the 350 tonnes of garbage it generates every day, and neighboring municipalities can only absorb 100 tonnes of waste from Yunlin per day, Lee said, calling on the EPA to provide assistance.
Chinese Nationalist Party （KMT） Legislator Chiang Hui-chen （江惠貞） challenged the EPA’s regional management program, saying that cross-region operations would require trash transfer stations, which have not been built and would certainly be opposed by local residents.
Nantou has more than 4,000 tonnes of unprocessed trash piling up, DPP Legislator Tsai Huang-liang （蔡煌瑯） said, adding that the county was the victim of local governments’ independent waste management.
Nantou does not have any incinerators, and mainly relies on Taichung to process its trash, but Taichung has lately been unwilling to accept garbage from other areas, Tsai said.
With the exception of Yilan, Miaoli and Changhua counties, as well as Taoyuan, most municipalities that operate incinerators have surplus processing capacity, Tsai said, adding that the crisis was due to inadequate efforts at coordination by the central government.
Questioning the right for a local government to refuse to accept waste from another region, DPP Legislator Chen Chieh-ju （陳節如） asked why the EPA has no authority over the management of the incinerators that it funded.
Wei said that there is no legal provision that allows the EPA to intervene in the autonomy of local governments, leaving it only able to appeal to facilities with spare capacity to help crisis-stricken municipalities.
新聞來源：TAIPEI TIMES
