Newsletter
RESOURCE RECYCLING AND REUSE LAW
The Legislative Yuan has passed the Resource Recycling and Reuse Law, which seeks to realize the government’s resource recycling policies by shifting from "end-stage control: to "manage-ment at source," and by emphasizing incentives. The main points are as follows:
Designated specific industries will be required to use materials, specifications, and designs that facilitate the degrading, dismantling or recycling of products, at the development, design, manu-facturing, production, and sales stages of a prod-uct’s life cycle, and during engineering works. They will also be required to recover and reuse recyclable resources, and to mark items to iden-tify materials and recycling categories. A com-bination of controls and incentives will be used to promote the reuse of recyclable materials.
The law defines matters for government an-nouncement or approval concerning the recovery and reuse of recyclable resources, and empowers the relevant authorities to make related regula-tions. It also defines standards for recyclable resources and recycled products. In order to promote the effective recovery and reuse of re-cyclable resources in Taiwan, when necessary the authorities may restrict or ban imports and exports of recyclable resources. Enterprises must report their production, storage and reuse of recyclable resources.
Government agencies, public educational estab-lishments, state-owned enterprises and organi-zations, and military agencies, must preferen-tially purchase government-approved environ-mentally friendly products, local recycled prod-ucts, or products containing at least a certain proportion of recycled resources. The Envi-ronmental Protection Administration must regularly select enterprises of outstanding achievement to receive monetary awards, grants, or commendations.
Violations of the law may be penalized by fines of NT$30,000 to NT$150,000, which may be imposed repeatedly on a monthly basis. In se-rious cases, enterprises may be ordered to sus-pend all or part of their operations for a period of one month to one year, or if necessary to cease operating altogether.