TAIPEI, Taiwan - The Recycling Found Management Board of Taiwan Environmental Protection Administration’s 20th anniversary results exhibition “2018 Taiwan Recycling Tour – Recycling Foundation 20th Anniversary” drew a successful close on August 25. The exhibition not only received a high degree of approval from the public in Taiwan but was also highly impressive to the foreign guests in attendance. Following the conclusion of the exhibition, the Bureau Francais de Taipei invited the foundation to participate as keynote speakers in a seminar at the “Pollutec 2018” 40th anniversary exhibition, which was held in Lyon, France.
The Recycling Found representative participant, Deputy Secretary Song Xin-zhen, at the opening ceremony delivered a keynote speech on the topic of “20 Years of Recycling, Brown to Gold: The Experiences of the Recycling Fund Management Board, EPA, Taiwan” to promote Taiwan’s experiences in implementing resource recycling.
Song Xin-zhen stated that the main purpose of joining the event this time was in hopes of sharing Taiwan’s results and experiences in resource recycling with international friends. Especially anticipated sharing Taiwan’s experiences accumulated over 20 years of actual measures and promoting innovative technologies for green recycling.
She noted that Taiwan’s accomplishments did not happen in just one day, and they depended on 20 years of accumulated experience to be realized step by step. Furthermore, the main key to today’s achievements was generating economic incentives through legal policies and subsidies to facilitate participation among the public and industries. Meanwhile, R&D on meaningful and innovative technologies has also driven industries and applications.
Song Xin-zhen also emphasized that the actual recycling rate is an important key. She pointed out that the implementation of high recycling rates is an important indicator, and in order to attain this objective it is necessary to establish diverse and smoothly-running recycling channels.
Taking Taiwan as an example, establishing township resource recycling stations and circular economy recycling policies have enabled the public to carry out resource recovery recycling at the village level. At the same time, this has also enabled the public to redeem living supplies and vouchers for substantive feedback through recycling in order to gain a variety of benefits.
Furthermore, through the use of short-term employment, circular economy collection groups have been formed by hiring self-employed individuals.
In terms of the innovative recycling technologies, Deputy Secretary Song pointed out that the goal is to maximize the value of reused products, therefore, circular economy must be guided from supply and demand of recycling prices in the market. For instance, at this year’s 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia, bottles recycled by Taiwan’s Far Eastern New Century Corporation were utilized to manufacture environmentally friendly yarn for the uniforms of 16 teams. In addition, a “waste LCD panel recycling system” developed by the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) which was the recipient of a prize at the R&D 100 Awards, and UWin Nanotech has independently created environmentally-friendly tin and gold stripping technologies which can separately extract metals, such as gold, silver, palladium, copper, and tin from e-waste materials.
Song Xin-zhen believes that environmental protection is currently a collective global problem and hopes that through their recycling experiences, Taiwan will have more interactions with a variety of other countries. In addition to having exchanges with the Mayor of Lyon, France, she also interacted with the United Nations Environmental Program and hopes to be able to bring more assistance to the other countries.
(TR/ Phil Sweeney)
