TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — A community run recycling yard in Wanhua District that has been operating for nearly 50 years has been ordered to shut down by the Taipei City Department of Urban Development.
The recycling yard processes recyclables collected by about 200 people every day according to Ngóo-kak (五角拌), the youth run community group that manages the site. The group said that if forced to close, many of the elderly, disabled, and otherwise disadvantaged people who gather recycling and sell it there would lose their already meager incomes.
“Many people whose time and physical and mental conditions are difficult to integrate into the mainstream job market often choose waste picking,” Ngóo-kak said on Thursday (Feb. 2). “Waste picking work can be said to be the last line of defense for the disadvantaged to live independently.”
The income from collecting recycling for over 12 hours per working day often fails to exceed NT$6000 per month (US$200), while nearly a third of the recyclers are women over 65, according to Ngóo-kak.
The manager of the recycling center surnamed Huang (黃), told reporters the yard had been open since 1965, passing through three generations of his family. He said he was notified by the Taipei City Government in Nov. that the center violated land use laws and would have to close.
Ngóo-kak says that after years of disadvantaged recyclers helping keep the community clean, the government is now abandoning them. “(The recyclers) should become cooperators in the transformation of the urban environment and net-zero emissions,” they said.
Acting Chief of the Urban Planning Division of the Department of Urban Development Su Hsin-hui (蘇芯慧) said that the land was in a type 3 residential area, in which resource recycling yards are illegal. She said that in order to comply with the Local Government Act, the plant would need to relocate to an appropriately zoned area and pass a government inspection.
Ngóo-kak is calling on Taipei City to improve land use laws and regulations to adapt to social and environmental changes, in order to allow recycling yards such as theirs to stay open in central areas. One area he suggested for rezoning was unused space under the nearby Hwa-chung Bridge (華中橋) or the surrounding riverside.