In 1988, Taiwan Provincial Government upgraded the Environmental Protection Bureau as the Department of Environmental Protection, responsible for comprehensive planning, waste management, environmental sanitation and toxic substance management, supervision evaluation, environmental monitoring, information management, etc. Since then, each city and county government set up an Environmental Protection Bureau to enhance environmental protection work and function. However, Taipei City Government launched initiatives to resolve waste disposal problems earlier in 1985, whose purpose was to develop a sound recycling society and bring Taipei into a phase of “a zero waste, recycling society.”

　　　　　　　　　　（Photos in below are taken by our team members.）

Fude Landfill was the first, oldest site for waste treatment by burial. The amount of waste was around 2,600 metric tons on average every day at that time, and it increased with the rate of 8% every year. Fude Landfill indeed improved the problem of environmental pollution to a great extent. Yet, it was shut down in 1994 because the capacity of this landfill was consumed and shrank year after year. Sangjuku Landfill took over the job and continued to deal with waste treatment. Because finding a place and building a landfill is not easy, the government therefore started building an incinerator to help solve the problem. Although the incinerator decreased the amount of waste buried in the landfill, however, people still produced tons and tons of garbage. The amount of waste still remained high. Thus, Environmental Protection Bureau took some measures successively, including the treatment and reuse of ashes on the bottom of the incinerator and dirt/culvert sludge, garbage classification and mandatory blue bags to collect non-recyclable refuse, to maximize resource recycling, minimize the incinerated waste and discontinue the use of landfills. It is hope that by 2020, significant waste reduction has been achieved and recycling of resources has been improved.

　　　　　　　　　　（Photos in below are taken by our team members.）

Nowadays, landfills like Sangjuku Landfill have gradually transformed to regional recycling centers as well as ecological parks for providing disaster relief. That is to say, they can be a temporary area to store a lot of waste produced by a calamity. Once the waste is classified and recycled, they can be transported to specific locations and utilized successively.