Taiwan: New Recycling Fee Rate Discount Measures
To encourage manufacturers to design environmentally friendly products, the Taiwanese Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) has tightened the eligibility criteria for discounted recycling fee rates.
Since January this year, a 15 percent discount is given to all Green Mark products. As for IT products, only those that carry the Green Mark or the Energy Saving Label are eligible for a 30 percent reduction (five percent for printers). EPA has established new measures that came into effect in January 2016. These include revisions to the online reporting of industrial waste, amendments to the Regulations Governing Air Quality Models and Simulations, discounts on recycling fee rates for environmentally friendly products, the tightening of mercury maximums for cylindrical batteries, and the banning of chromate copper arsenate as a wood preservative. Since Taiwan began rolling out its recycling measures in 1997, its recycling rate climbed from 5.88 percent (288,000 tons) to 55.59 percent, or 1.012 million tons, in 2014. According to EPA, the daily per capita garbage collected was at an all-time low of 0.383 kilogram. The authority will continue to work towards increasing resource efficiency and sustainable cyclical use of resources to attain its 2017 target of a recycling rate of 65 percent, EPA said in a report.
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