Hsinchu County Government Environmental Protection Bureau hasestablished the "Hsinchu County Environmental Protection Bureau Public Nuisance Petitions Complaints Center" in 1992, specifically dealing with citizens’ petitions, and receiving more than 400 citizens’ public nuisance petitions each year. The Center deals with general environmental pollution cases in a way of being on 24-hour stand-by, so it can exactly know the polluted problems, and quickly find effective solutions to solve and then ensure the best quality of human life. The most common petitions are "open burning" petitions, including the
behaviors of burning agricultural wastes generated from farming, burning woods or flammable wastes produced by the civil construction units, burning wire and cable wastes to remove the outside plastic portion by hardware recycling industries, and burning general household garbage to reduce the amount of garbage and so on. These short-term, small-scale, highly polluted and lots of burning sources which can not be controlled by the system, will seriously affect the air quality. In addition, it often disperses harmful gases(such as dioxins) and causes smelly smell while burning, which not only damage the human health, but also have large impact on the environmental quality. Hence, It is important to strengthen the control, inspection and patrol work of any arbitrary open burning.
In the aspect of open burning patrol and control work, there were 180 cases found to burn things in open space. There were 62 serious cases to be informed, and total amount of the fine is $ 605,000. In addition, 7 sets of remote control and monitoring systems and 15 fake monitors have been set up to carry out monitoring matters of the hot burning zones. In the aspect of reducing straw burning, two propaganda were held to teach farmers the correct way of handling agricultural wastes, and to give 12,000 kg of organic fertilizer to farmers to avoid 360 metric tons of straw from direct burning. Also, through "Straw Recycling Platform", it help farmers solve about 6 tons of straw waste problem.
In the aspect of environmental pollution petitions patrol and control, the statistics during the program was executed from January 1 of 2017 to December 31 of 2017 showed that a total of 3,164 petitions were reviewed, which including 1,589 cases of odor pollution among air pollution, 718 cases of environmental sanitation, 399 cases of noise pollution, 175 cases of wastes, 144 cases of water pollution, 124 cases of air pollution excluding odor pollution, and the proportion of the remaining cases is not more than 1%, and the average processing efficiency time was 0.71 days.
On the other hand, two sessions of environmental educational trainings were held to strengthen the professional function and service attitude of planners. Besides, four propaganda were held to educate the public for reducing burning joss paper. This year concentrated burning of joss paper was held at Ching Ming Festival, Ghost Festival and temples’ major festivals, having concentrated a total of 48.72 tons of joss paper. Also, there were 10
temples and 6 temples respectively being advised to seal furnace permanently and seal furnace on major festivals.
