The Yunlin County Government said it had reduced the county’s overall trash volume by 7 percent after implementing a policy of searching people’s garbage bags and rejecting them if they contain recyclables or food scraps.
Yunlin’s waste output had risen during the COVID-19 pandemic to about 400 metric tonnes per day, Yunlin Environmental Protection Bureau director Zhang Qiao-wei (張喬維) said in a statement.
The increase appeared to be driven by changes in consumer behaviors, such as a rise in packaging waste from online shopping, as well as a failure to separate recycling and trash, he said.
Photo: Huang Shu-li, Taipei Times
To reverse that trend, the county government adopted a policy in March last year instructing waste management workers to search some residents’ trash bags and refuse those that contained food scraps and other recyclable materials, he said.
Since the implementation of the policy, waste disposal workers have opened about 100,000 garbage bags and rejected almost 20,000, because they contained recyclables such as paper products and food scraps, Zhang said.
In addition, 61 garbage trucks containing about 1,000 metric tonnes of trash were also rejected when they went to unload, because inspectors found that they contained garbage that was not properly sorted, he said.
Zhang did not say how the county dealt with the rejected garbage truck loads.
Changhua County also has a similar policy.
Yunlin’s monthly trash volume in November last year was 1,200 metric tonnes lower than in July, equivalent to about 7 percent less trash per day, said Teng Ya-chen (鄧雅謓), head of the Yunlin bureau’s Waste Management Division.
The county generates 360 metric tonnes of trash per day, which it hopes, with continued enforcement, to reduce to 340 metric tonnes by the end of this year, the bureau said.
The bureau said that Yunlin County does not have a waste incineration plant, and previously had to rely on other cities and counties to help with its waste disposal.
However, in recent years, the county has adopted a “zero waste” approach and has also begun producing solid recovered fuels, or refuse-derived fuels, from recovered waste, it said.
Of the remaining garbage, some is sent for incineration at the Mailiao Refinery, while the rest is sent to six local landfills, the bureau said.
With the county now largely self-sufficient in waste disposal, it aims to gradually remove and process the waste in its landfills until the landfills themselves can be closed and used for other purposes, it said.
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