Taiwan's Policy on Excessive Packaging Restriction

摘要

Due to its high population density and limited land resource, waste disposal has always been a challenging issue in Taiwan. To address this issue, Taiwan has adopted an ambitious zero waste policy and an implementation action plan recently. As a part of the action plan, policies on restricting plastic bags and disposal tableware, and mandatory sorting of household wastes have been implemented since 2002 and 2005, respectively. A new regulation on restricting excessive packaging for gift boxes of pastries, cosmetics, alcoholic products and processed foods, as well as disks of computer program works, has also been promulgated in July 2005 and will come into effect in July 2006. Based on the new packaging restriction regulation, the packaging volume ratio for the regulated products shall be less than 1, and the number of packaging layers shall be no more than 3 for pastries and disks of computer program works and no more than 2 for all other regulated products. The first stage of the regulation will come into effect on July 1, 2006, covering pastries, cosmetics, alcoholic products and disks of computer program works; while the second stage, set for July 1, 2007, will further extend the coverage to processed foods. TEPA expects the regulation to reduce the amount of packaging waste by 6,900 metric tons, or 26% of total packaging used by regulated products each year.