The Environmental Protection Administration's (EPA) new plan to clean up Taipei came under fire from environmentalists yesterday, who labeled it a waste of resources.
The comments came after the EPA and the Taipei City Government yesterday handed out 59 GPS devices to the city's “cleanliness and beautification assistants” to help them spot and upload photographs of eyesores to bring them to the attention of environmental bureaus or community volunteers.
The plan is aimed at making environmental cleanup more efficient, officials said.
However, activists criticized the program, saying “it was not designed with environmental protection in mind, but was a poorly planned scheme to boost employment.”
At a press conference at Taipei City Hall, EPA Minister Steven Shen (沈世宏) said that with the help of the GPS devices and digital cameras, these environmental assistants can easily locate, photograph and upload the pictures to the agency's Ecolife Web site to alert local authorities or communities to attend to the situation.
“This makes our environment more transparent. Since the assistants began working in February, many communities across the country have become cleaner,” said Yuan Shaw-ying (袁紹英), director-general of the EPA's Department of Environmental Sanitation and Toxic Substance Management.
Yuan said that Taipei was not the only city that has hired assistants.
“A total of 1,234 assistants have been hired nationwide and are spread throughout the nation's 26 cities and counties,” he said.
While the positions are short-term jobs, with the contracts expiring in June, Yuan said the program had been so effective that the EPA had asked the Executive Yuan to consider extending it.
“Most of the assistants are new college graduates who are young and apt with computers, so they can maintain blogs online and provide a digitalized platform for community members to discuss places that need to be cleaned ... Communities can also engage in competitions to see which ones are the most efficient in cleaning messy places,” he said.
Environmental groups were less keen on the program.
“If there is a job that can really improve the environment, I don't think anyone would be opposed to it; but while the EPA's mentality is on the right track, its execution is skewed,” said Calvin Wen (溫炳原), former secretary-general of Green Party Taiwan.
“If the EPA has a budget to boost employment, it could have summoned environmental groups to discuss and come up with schemes that actually improve the environment,” Wen said.
Wen said the money could have been spent to dispatch temporary workers to inspect pollution from industrial parks instead of taking pictures of dirty residential communities while not actually cleaning them up.
“Even training the new workers to hold recycling workshops around the nation would be more useful than that,” he said.
“If the government wants to spend money this way, it may as well just hand out social welfare checks, as the effect would be similar to this program,” he added.
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