Recent media reports have revealed that certain operators are illegally evading the triplicate manifest system and GPS controls to transport and dump waste unlawfully. The Ministry of Environment (MOENV) takes this matter very seriously. Regarding cases such as illegal waste dumping in Mt. Matou, in addition to interagency collaboration among prosecutors, police, and environmental agencies to combat environmental crimes, the government has also adopted technological tools and AI to build a smart geofencing system using vehicle recognition and real-time monitoring to deter illegal activities, demonstrating its firm commitment to cracking down on environmental crimes.

In recent years, environmental crime cases have become increasingly organized, large-scale, and cross-regional, increasing the difficulty of investigation. The Environmental Management Administration (EMA) has proactively promoted joint crackdowns with prosecutors and police. According to statistics, since 2015, 2,516 cases have been referred to judicial authorities, 7,700 individuals have been prosecuted, 961 pieces of equipment have been seized, and several major cases have been uncovered, including licensed recycling institutions engaging in “fake reuse, real disposal,” large-scale dumping of waste materials in farmlands and fishponds, illegal soil dumping syndicates, the illegal burial of construction waste by a certain enterprise in Baoshan Township, Hsinchu County, and cross-county dumping of acidic industrial liquid waste.

To prevent illegal dumping, the EMA in recent years has introduced the smart geofencing system, piloting it in central and southern Taiwan. The goal is to use technology to enhance monitoring and enforcement efficiency. The system combines vehicle license plate recognition with real-time monitoring and integrates AI object recognition to precisely target high-risk vehicles, providing law enforcement officers with early warnings of various illegal waste transportation patterns to enable immediate action and prevent unlawful dumping. The EMA stated that on August 20, 2024, it submitted a proposal to the Executive Yuan entitled “National Smart Waste Flow Remote Digital Management and Decision-Making Plan,” requesting a budget of NT$2.35 billion over four years to expand the deployment of 2,200 license plate recognition and e-Tag systems. It will also integrate existing cross-agency government resources to form a denser smart geofence network and establish a Smart Enforcement Decision Center to implement remote enforcement and enhance law enforcement effectiveness.

Given the irreversibility and limited nature of environmental resources such as land, to accelerate the cleanup and restoration of illegally dumped sites and deter illegal waste dumping, the latest amendments to the Waste Disposal Act and the Resource Recycling Act increase the maximum sentence from five to seven years. For dumping in ecologically sensitive areas, the proposed amendments would raise the sentence to between three to ten years of imprisonment. In addition, to prevent offenders from quickly transferring assets after being investigated, the Waste Disposal Act has been revised to allow environmental authorities to apply to the administrative court for provisional seizure once cleanup costs have been estimated, thereby initiating claim preservation measures.

In order to protect our homeland, the MOENV emphasizes that it will continue to strengthen cross-agency collaboration, the operation of smart geofencing, and legal reinforcement, focusing on pollution prevention to accurately identify violations, trace pollution sources as quickly as possible, and ensure that illegal activities cannot go undetected.