A Cost Analysis of Food Waste Composting in Taiwan
Department of Health Care Management, National Taipei University of Nursing and Health Sciences, Taipei 11219, Taiwan
Academic Editor: Thomas A. Trabold
Sustainability 2016, 8(11), 1210; https://doi.org/10.3390/su8111210
Received: 21 July 2016 / Revised: 3 November 2016 / Accepted: 14 November 2016 / Published: 22 November 2016
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Food Waste Management and Utilization)
Taiwan’s Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) has enacted a food waste recycling policy since 2003 as an alternative of landfill and incineration for the final disposal of municipal solid waste. Recycled food waste is currently seen as a valuable material, especially when appropriate technology is developed. This paper conducts a cost/benefit analysis based on six cases of food waste composting plants in Taiwan, finding that (1) the composting of food waste may yield the most net benefit compared to other applications of today; (2) the production cost of compost ranges from NT$ 2897–23,117/tonne; (3) the adoption of more automatic technology may reduce operation costs and, thus, a closed composting system with mechanical aeration may be more cost effective; (4) the output is a determinant of affecting production costs and private firms are more competitive in production costs than government-affiliated composting units; (5) all of the government-affiliated composting units face a negative profit and thus they are required to make use of the market value of the produced compost to achieve economic viability; and (6) a subsidy to the compost producer is needed to expand the market demand as the food waste recycled can save the disposal cost of municipal solid waste (MSW) incineration.
View Full-Text
Keywords:
cost analysis; composting; mechanical aeration; food waste; recycling
▼
Show Figures
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Chen, Y.-T. A Cost Analysis of Food Waste Composting in Taiwan. Sustainability 2016, 8, 1210. https://doi.org/10.3390/su8111210
AMA Style
Chen Y-T. A Cost Analysis of Food Waste Composting in Taiwan. Sustainability. 2016; 8(11):1210. https://doi.org/10.3390/su8111210
Chicago/Turabian StyleChen, Yi-Tui. 2016. "A Cost Analysis of Food Waste Composting in Taiwan" Sustainability 8, no. 11: 1210. https://doi.org/10.3390/su8111210
Find Other Styles
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.
Search more from Scilit