Sat, Apr 19, 2003 page16

• Turning waste into gold

  Composting as a way of dealing with organic waste goes back a long way, but Taiwan is only just rediscovering how this age-old method could benefit the environment

  • By Peggy Lim / CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
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  Pierre Loisel (劉力學), a long-term Canadian resident of Taiwan, pulls out of his driveway in the darkness of a 3:30 morning. Every other day, painting red lights green on empty streets, he heads from his coastal plot of land in the outskirts of Taipei's Sanchih County towards Taipei City. In Neihu District, he collects dark green bins and loads them onto what he affectionately calls his pun truck. Pun is Taiwanese for leftovers, organic waste such as chicken bones, rotten vegetables, and miscellaneous plate scrapings.

  Collecting kitchen waste to feed pigs is an ancient but somewhat diminishing practice in urban Taiwan. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, less than 4 percent of nation's daily 6,000 tonnes of organic waste gets recycled in that way. Most organic waste, which makes up 20 to 30 percent of an average household's daily garbage, gets treated like regular garbage -- dumped in landfills or sent to incinerators.

  Loisel, a former computer scientist who has spent the last several years of his retirement investigating alternative garbage uses, says this is a waste. He advocates that organic waste, besides that which is fed to pigs, be recycled through composting. Arguing that composting can and will be implemented across the island, Loisel says, "It's more a matter of time now, than whether it can work. With the independent backing of groups as diverse as the Homemakers Union and Foundation, Taiwan Formosa Plastics Corporation, and the Environmental Protection Agency, recycling kitchen waste into organic compost may not be so far around the corner.

  

  Every other morning, Pierre Loisel takes his truck out to collect organic waste, which he makes into fertilizer that he uses on his plot and shares with local farmers.

  PHOTO: PEGGY LIM

  Problematic pun

  Several years ago, Loisel and his surrounding community began using a small incinerator sponsored by the EPA to clean up the area. The incinerator released safe carbon dioxide and steam byproducts, but was unable to handle large quantities of organic waste. The high water content of organic waste mixed with ashes creates a "big cake" at the bottom of an incinerator. "An incinerator is not a cooking stove; it's made not to boil, but to burn garbage," said Loisel.

  Learning that the government had had no luck solving the "pun" cake problem with its larger incinerators either, Loisel looked for alternatives for dealing with the organic waste. After consulting National Taiwan University Agricultural Chemistry professor, Wu Sun-ho (吳三和), he learned that besides feeding pigs, one could compost the waste, using microorganisms to decompose it into nutrient-rich soil. Loisel set out to collect pun on a larger scale and began experimenting ways of turning pun into a lucrative business.

  By 5:40am, Loisel has by himself amassed over a ton of pun. Back at his home property, Loisel mixes the pun "which includes everything from pineapple cores to clam shells, wood shavings and rice husks." Free from local farmers and furniture makers, the husks and shavings provide the crucial carbon-rich material to balance out the high nitrogen levels, which gives the decaying matter its stench. In three months, the compost is ready for use. Loisel has so far shared this compost with other farmers or used it in his own garden.

  He jokes that if he, a single foreigner, can handle one ton a day, the Taiwanese government should certainly be able to do more.

  Organized support

  The President of the Homemakers Union and Foundation (主婦聯盟環境保護基金會), Chen Man-li (陳曼麗) agrees. She applauds the example that Loisel has provided, but says that what he is able to achieve is still limited. To reach a greater scale, Chen argues, "We need the government to step in."

  In 1996, the Homemakers Union and Foundation began to promote the recycling of organic waste. Their grassroots movement to recycle kitchen waste grew from 290 households in 1998 to over 5,000 households in 2000. Then, they stopped expanding because, as Chen explains, the organization realized that the government's involvement was needed in order for the process to be more effective. "We proved that collecting organic waste at a household level can work, but we need the government to use its power and policy to require every family to recycle its waste, and provide the resources to collect and process it, she told the Taipei Times.

  Recycling organic waste requires the same kind of manpower, equipment, land, transportation capital, and civilian cooperation necessary in large-scale garbage collection, but Chen argues, if the government recycles organic waste properly, it is still doing its job handling garbage, just putting it to better use.

  She admits, however, that the composting results so far have not been so spectacular. Chen explains that because the Taiwanese government left it up to individual neighborhood governments to "do it themselves," the attempts have often been half-hearted and haphazard.

  Finding the value

  In the past few years, several large companies such as Taiwan Formosa Plastics Corporation (台塑集團) have also begun to realize the possibly huge economic value of recycling kitchen waste. In the April issue of CommonWealth (天下雜誌), widely read by Taiwanese businessmen, one spokesperson for the Nan-Ya division of the plastics company estimates that there is a NT$50 billion potential market for organic compost. Taiwan's nutrient-depleted soil is in desperate need of organic conditioning. Overuse of chemical fertilizers has drastically lowered the soil's pH levels, and contaminated groundwater supplies. According to the Council of Agriculture, 12 tonnes of organic compost would need to be applied to each tonne of Taiwan's soil to improve its organic quality, "which means a potential demand for 10 billion tonnes of organic compost a year."

  Two years ago, Formosa Plastics began constructing compost facilities in the towns of Mailiau and Taihsi and has plans to expand into Yunlin, Changhua, Chiayi, and Taipei. The company has also sought contracts from the government to process the organic waste, but the government has been slow to sign over such rights.

  Loisel believes opposition within government arises because composting diverts garbage from traditional disposal methods, on which the government has already invested. Each of the incinerators that the government recently purchased to meet growing garbage problems has a near NT$1 billion price tag.

  Loisel says, "half of that is the cost to buy it, the other half is payback to middle people. They don't like to see composting because if you recycle and compost, the incinerator will close. There's practically nothing left to burn. So they will lose their income."

  From the enthusiastic cooperation he receives in the communities where he collects pun, Loisel is confident that support for this method is there. In areas where separation of garbage into organic and inorganic waste has already begun, residents have been able to reduce the overall amount they throw out in pricey official trash bags by 30 percent to 50 percent. For many, those savings are incentive enough to be more active recyclers.

  Alternative methods

  The Environmental Protection Agency has also begun to support the movement towards recycling kitchen waste. After all, it helped provide a NT$500,000 grant to support Loisel's compost research. From Sunday, Loisel will be holding a book signing for his recently released autobiography Son of the Planet (大地之子) between 4pm and 7pm through to Thursday at the Eslite book store in Taipei's Sogo department store on Chunghsiao East Road. On Tuesday at 2pm, EPA Director Hao Long-bin (郝龍斌) will team up with Loisel to promote pun recycling, and organic farming at a seminar on the 11th floor of the department store. Loisel acknowledges: "The EPA is slowly promoting it [composting]. But for a country's policy to change is not easy. You can't change it with one word. It's like a big ship; it will turn, but slowly."

  Complicated questions continue to pop up about how exactly organic waste recycling should be implemented across the island. For example, should people separate their kitchen waste even further into what goes to pigs and what goes to compost? How should the compost be distributed? Would the compost be too oily or salty for some farming? But the interest at the grassroots environmental level and at the corporate level is certainly on the rise.

  The use of organic compost may even help open up other markets, such as the more upstream organic foods market, which might throw a lifeline to Taiwan's farmers, struggling to survive in a harsher post-WTO environment. The rise of organic food chain stores, like Little Green City (綠色小鎮), attest to the growing popularity of such products in Taiwan.

  But as Chen of the Homemakers Union points out, for composting to work and such advantages to be gained, "we can't just count on a Pierre Loisel and the Homemakers Union. We need the government, and we want the whole island to be doing it."
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