An award ceremony was held at the square of Historical Taichung Prefecture Hallon the morning of Tuesday, November 11, 2014. Chaired by Deputy Mayor Tsai Bing-kun (蔡炳坤), the award ceremony was meant to recognize 88 green restaurants, 23 village offices and 14 schools for their good performance in source reduction and recycling. It was also used to confer awards to the first-place individual winner in the Heping District’s recycling point collection competition and the first-place winner in Heping District’s Happiness Resource Recycling Station. In addition, the top three winners in either the Student Group or the Adult Group and 11 Excellence Award winners of the “Environmental Protection Heart Paradise" Photography Competition were acknowledged as well. In total there were 138 awards given out in this ceremony.

Spread across 22 administrative districts of Taichung City, the 88 green restaurants were evaluated by six indicators, including legality, waste reduction, cleanness, energy-saving, water-saving, and green diet consumption. All of them are highly recommendable to consumers. Furthermore, 34 of the 88 green restaurants have won the honor for two consecutive years in both 2013 and 2014 because of their advancement and innovation in source reduction and recycling. For example, the Joy Pastoral Vegan Café (喜樂田園蔬食館) has changed all its paper pads into washable place mats for reuse.The Double Happiness Wedding Banquet Restaurant (雙囍婚宴會館) has set up curtains for its ceiling windows in the dining area to block the sun, thus reducing energy consumption. The Rixiang Vitality Garden (日祥生機園地) promotes a macrobiotic diet and keeps the old trees inside its restaurant. AUO-attached Restaurant (友達光電附設餐廳) covers all its cooked meals in the dining rooms and uses rice towels to wrap fresh vegetables in the kitchen area to avoid contamination and to keep ingredients fresh. Wuma BBQ (屋馬燒肉) offers local ingredients, uses dish detergent with a green mark, and provides concessions to dinners using their own dinnerware. Over 80% of the 88 recommended restaurants put up EPB's"green eating" table cards encouraging consumers to pack their own leftover food so as to cherish food and reduce waste from the source. It is also worth mentioning that 48 of the 88 restaurants are offering 10% discounts from now until December 31, 2014. To download their coupons, please visit the EPB website (http://recycle.epb.taichung.gov.tw/).

Regarding the model village offices, the first prizes went to Tu-ku Village of West District (西區土庫里), Tan-yang Village of Tanzi District (潭子區潭陽里), Cao-nan Village of Wuci District (梧棲區草湳里), and Zhi-bu Village of Dadu District (大肚區蔗廍里). All these award-winning village offices have one feature in common: All of them are ingenuous enough to reuse recycled things. For example, the iron plate is transformed into a chess table; fruit and vegetable peels are used to make enzyme; plants recycled from wedding or funeral ceremonies are used to make greenery; and bicycles are used to generate power. In some occasions, they even combine environmental protection with social welfare. For example, they sell the recycled goods and use the money as scholarships to finance disadvantaged families and/or students living in their villages.

The common features of award-winning schools include good practice in energy-saving control, classification and recycling, and paperless conference. For example, Feng Chia University (逢甲大學) has formed an environmental protection and energy saving committee and has included the environmental education into its academic development plan. Chaoyang University (朝陽大學) has gained a certification for its environmental education facilities. Asia University (亞洲大學) promotes a second-hand book exchange program and has installed solar panels. Xiaoming Girls (曉明女中) actively and effectively promotes recycling in every classroom by the way of sampling and peer assessment. Fengyuan Commercial High School (豐原高商) has set up LED electronic bulletin board to save paper and printing costs. Wen-hua High School (文華高中) encourages its students and faculty to take a vegan meal per week and has used heat pumps to supply hot water to student dormitories.

To increase resource recovery rate in Heping District, the EPB has set up 15 "Happiness Resource Recycling Stations" and issued 2,000" happiness bankbooks" in Heping District in 2014. The purpose is to encourage residents in Heping District to bring their recyclables to Happiness Resource Recycling Stations to deposit recycling collection points into their happiness bankbooks for exchange of daily necessities. The Happiness Resource Recycling Stations have started operation since August 11, 2014. The amount of recovery has accumulated to 47 tons as of the end of September. With intensive promotion by schools and communities during this period, the amount of recovery from August to September has reached 220 tons in the entire Heping District, a 40% increase over the same period last year. To recognize the good performance of Happiness Resource Recycling Stations and the people, the EPB thus awarded the first-place winning Happiness Resource Recycling Station and individual at the ceremony.

22 out of 619 entries were evaluated and selected by the jury as winners in the 2014 "Environmental Protection Heart Paradise" Photography Competition. Each of the winning pieces conveys the good intentions and efforts of environmental protection volunteers and the EPB cleaning teams, when they were engaged in street sweeping, beach cleaning, resource recycling, or kitchen waste recycling. Deputy Mayor Tsai Bing-kun conferred certificates and prize money to the top three winners and three Excellence Award winners in each group. Tsai thanked all the winners for taking such wonderful pictures to catch the enthusiastic images of environmental protection volunteers and the EPB cleaning teams at a particular moment. He invited our citizens to view the winning photos exhibited at the first-floor lobby of Historical Taichung Prefecture Hall from November 11(Tuesday) to November 25(Tuesday).

It is hoped that the evaluation of resource recycling operations will encourage more people and units to get involved in environmental protection and create a new environmental protection era in Taichung City, EPB said.