A comparative study on resource recycling system of waste containers since the point of view of EPR

• Main Authors: Jen-Hsiung Chung, 鍾仁雄
• Other Authors: Yu-Sung Lai
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/72721975314872881076

碩士 === 國立東華大學 === 環境政策研究所 === 97 === Stimulated by the well-development of industry and commerce, the lifestyle of the mass production, consumption and disposal has affected quality of life of the people. It was followed by a large number of wastes generated. In the past, the way of waste management was based on the premise of environmental health and aimed at end-of-pipe treatment; today, approaches of source reduction, resource recycling were adopted to inhibit the generation of wastes into the landfill and incineration and to prevent the exhaustion of land constrained resources for the purpose of environmental protection. In the 90's, while many countries were facing how to establish a better and more perfect environmental management of managing waste, the Extended Producer Responsibility, a new environmental management tool, was received extensively attention by advanced countries around the world and soon it turned into an emerging new waste management policy tool. The concepts include the environmental impact caused by the whole life cycle of a product, and the extension of product liability toward the stages of production, to the producer. Today many advanced countries had introduced this EPR into their national legal system and served as an important basis for legislation and planning for waste management and resources recycling system. The main purposes of this study are to compare the experiences, legal system of waste containers and waste recycling systems of the advanced countries, including Germany and Japan that applied concept of the EPR into waste container recycling system into implementation and control, with those of Taiwan and to propose recommendation for improvement of the legal basis in Taiwan. The results reveal that many shortages could be found in the existing legal bases of Taiwan's waste recycling systems. The results are as follows: (1) Waste Disposal Act did not clearly set up the priority among waste prevention, resources reuses, and disposal. Without it, the appropriate waste treatment result can not be effectively achieved; (2) The Waste Disposal Act has not any normality on obligations of reuse and recycling; However, there are many relevant norms on the recycling of resources and well detailed in the Resource Recycling Act. Thus, a resources recycling business is administered by two separate legal norms, which is the main cause of failure of recycling of waste containers. (3) The law of Waste Disposal didn’t set up target objectives for monitoring and evaluating the performance of the whole recovery business. It only commands that industry are required to pay handling charges to remove contractors and provide subsidies to the recycler business who are handling,processing and regenerating renewable material resources (4) The Waste Disposal Act not only did not clearly define the definition of extended producer responsibility, role playing, obligation and responsibilities, and norm of producer, but also did not set up different rule for various uses and types of the container package producers. At present, the Article 15,16 of the Waste Disposal Act only requests recycling industry to replace the recycling obligation by paying fees, a financial compensation. There is no clear and detailed specification rules on recycling obligations and responsibilities; (5) The current operation only applies a policy tool, recycling subsidies incentive to encourage the recycling tasks, which is not able to respond effectively to the market of different recycled materials and their environmental impacts; (6) Currently, the centralized recovery association is in charged by the staff of the central government, the Environmental Protection Administration. This organization takes over the administration, implementation and monitoring on the same time, thus it results in serious overloading and financial burden to the administrators who are involved. These are the causes of the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of operational failure. Moreover, the busy staffs are also incapable of responding to the trend of recovery material technology and research and development, it leads to the failure of control and the low effectiveness of the recycling. This study suggests that the law of waste management shall be revised. The norms on recycling that are currently distributing in two laws shall be revised. The definition of producers should further be revised and their obligations and responsibilities shall be extended to include the back-end obligations. In addition, the conduct of evaluation of overall performance and effectiveness of policy tools on recycling should first consider the establishment of appropriate indicators on rate of reutilization, and rate of the utilization of renewable sources. On the perspective of recycling system of waste containers, it is recommended that in addition to the existing control means of recycling subsidies, a survey which aims at assessing the difficulty of recovering and the degree of environmental impact of the target materials shall be conducted firs to help for proposing different policy tools to meet the needs.In addition, the direction of legislation shall drive to the aspects of producer own responsibility. First of all, by giving producers opportunity to think of new product design to tack with the difficulty facing during the implementation of recycling and regenerating process; the second, by offering authority to reduce the administrative costs, and involving the impartiality of the existing third supervision auditors, it is hoped to establish a good monitoring and control mechanism on the implementation of recovery work. Beside the above operations, the recovery authorities should consider the establishment of back end market of renewable and material flow industry in order to march toward the material recycling-based society. Finally, the researcher proposes that an investigation of the status of container packaging industry, establishment of a complete regeneration of market operation through counseling and measures such as tax relief and foster, and in line with an inter-ministerial joint annual review will help to build up and to promote the integrity of program and policy incentives of recycling system that are consisted by the manufacturing industries, recycling industries, as well as renewable material market in Taiwan.