Author(s)

S-C Yeh, Y-P Chu & H-C Yu

Abstract

Treatment of wastes from domestic, industrial and other sources has been an environmental issue of intensive concern in Taiwan in last decades. Pollution due to inappropriate disposal and treatment of wastes has led to deterioration of environmental quality and increased social costs. An aggregated model of a large scale region of a nation was developed in this study for exploring generation, treatment, accumulation, and accompanying cost of wastes from various sources and predicting their trends associated with different economic development scenarios using a system dynamics simulation tool Vensim@. Based on the assumptions regarding future economic development, the amounts of generation, treatment, and accumulation of hazardous and non-hazardous wastes from various sources and sectors were simulated. Additionally, waste treatment costs and the \“maintenance costs” under the framework of SEEA can then be calculated and these will further influence \“green GDP” of the nation by considering waste pollution. In addition to the baseline scenario where input parameters prior to the year of 1998 were used, three alternative scenarios were simulated from 1981 to 2011 to explore the trends of variables of interest. Results showed that a more aggressive scenario than the baseline is needed to achieve the EPA goal in the proper treatment rate of industrial wastes in 2011. It was also suggested that the EPA goal seems to be too conservative to attain sustainable use of the local environment. It was also indicated that although increasing the waste treatment ratio would bring about increase of treatment cost, the \“green GDP” of the nation would also raise up because of deduction in SEEA’S maintenance cost.

Keywords