Taoyuan incinerators saturated, industrial waste piles up into a garbage city

After incinerators in central and southern Taiwan temporarily stopped accepting industrial waste from other counties and cities in mid-September this year, many industrial zones in Taoyuan City began piling up garbage. Some was dumped inside idle factory buildings, while some was simply left in the open on vacant land, with piles even taller than a person, raising concerns about sanitation and safety.

This garbage piled up because a garbage war broke out in central Taiwan this year. Incinerators in Taichung, Kaohsiung and other places successively refused to accept waste or underwent annual maintenance. Some industrial waste clearance operators in Taoyuan City, worried that they would have nowhere to send garbage once they accepted it, had not dared to accept garbage for 2 to 3 months. For this reason, Taoyuan clearance operators went north yesterday to petition the Environmental Protection Administration, hoping the EPA could activate a coordination mechanism and require incinerators that still have spare capacity to set aside parochialism and allow industrial waste from other counties and cities into their plants.

Our country's waste can be divided into two categories: general waste and industrial waste. General waste is household garbage, while industrial waste is divided into hazardous industrial waste and general industrial waste, including agricultural, industrial and mining plants, construction businesses, hospitals and medical institutions, hypermarkets, school units, restaurants, hypermarkets, wholesale markets for agricultural products and others, all of which fall within the scope of regulated industrial waste.