Two men in Taipei earned NT$1 million (US$33,700) in a year-and-a-half just from impeachment rewards for informing on those who were in violation of the Waste Disposal Act (廢棄物清理法) and bringing it to the attention of the city’s Bureau of Environmental Protection.
Statistics from the bureau show that two men made an average of NT$110,000 per month collecting the rewards, with one earning NT$1.9 million and the other about NT$1 million.
Bureau officials said both were male and did not want their identity to be made public, adding that most of the rewards came from taking video footage of people throwing cigarette butts on the ground.
Photo: Chen Ching-min, Taipei Times
The official half jokingly said the two men were conducting their businesses “corporate style,” saying the pair had said they were hiring people, and buying video and photographic equipment to tail violators around the city.
If they found a scooter rider smoking, or someone driving with a cigarette in his hand hanging outside the window, they would “lock onto” the target and record the whole scene up until the rider or driver throws away the cigarette butt, officials said, adding that the footage would then be burned to DVD and sent to the bureau.
Their overheads were not met until nine months into their operation, the two men said, adding that the return rate on their investment was less than 40 percent, though they declined to state their expenditure on hiring and purchases of equipment.
The similarity between the two was that they did not do things sloppily and all their pictures or videos gave the bureau enough clues to go after violators, such as focusing on the car or scooter license plates, the official said, adding that the video captured every moment of the violators’ actions.
The majority of their income comes from taking videos or pictures of people littering the streets with cigarette butts, though a small portion also came from people posting small fliers that violate the law, the official said.
People littering the streets with cigarette butts can be fined up to NT$1,200, with 30 percent of that being the reward, about NT$360 per fine, the official said, adding that while the fine for illegal fliers is the same, the rewards are higher, 50 percent of the fine or NT$600 per case.
At a rough estimate, one man was reporting about 5,300 cases per month, while the second was reporting about 3,000 per month, the official said.
Another member of the public who has focused solely on pedestrian trashcans sent more than 300 cases to the bureau, of which the bureau has affirmed and taken legal action against 72.
At NT$900 per case, that person received more than NT$60,000 in rewards.
Bureau of Environmental Protection Third Section Chief Liang Hung-lang (梁宏朗) said that aside from fining people for littering cigarette butts, people that litter streets with bags of trash could be fined up to NT$6,000 and the informant gets 50 percent of that as a reward.
However, sources said the two men are of a mind to shut down their operations as their work requires too much effort.
Translated By Jake Chung, Staff Writer
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) was wooing leaders from across Africa with a banquet on Wednesday night, King Mswati III of Eswatini was notably absent. That is because the kingdom — about the size of New Jersey and with just 1.2 million people — is one of Taiwan’s remaining dozen diplomatic allies. That means Eswatini does not participate in Xi’s Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, the centerpiece of China’s diplomatic outreach to Africa, which was held in Beijing this week. The landlocked nation, which sits between Mozambique and South Africa, is the last holdout in Beijing’s seven-plus decade mission to make Africa