3.2.2. Promotion Policies for the Production of Bioenergy from Food Waste

Due to its richness in moisture, carbohydrate polymers and other constituents (e.g., protein, and lipids), food waste has been used as an excellent feedstock for the production of various kinds of value-added biobased materials and/or biobased products via microbial conversion, including methane, hydrogen, ethanol, organic acids, and bio-fertilizers [26,27]. More importantly, the production of bioenergy from food waste would not only solve the environmental hazards from the MSW incineration plants and sanitary landfill sites but will also mitigate the emissions of greenhouse gases while replacing the usage of fossil fuels by bioenergy. In Taiwan, the promotion policy for the production of bioenergy from food waste was based on the legislation of the Renewable Energy Development Act (REDA) in 2009, which was recently revised in 2019. Among the promotion measures in the REDA, the central governing agency (i.e., MOEA) shall announce the so-called feed-in tariff (FIT) rates for all types of renewable energy annually, which were reviewed or amended in considering related factors like technical progress in power generation, changes in cost and renewable electricity goal achievement. Table 6 listed the FIT rates for promoting electricity generation from biomass-to-power (via anaerobic digestion process or not) and waste-to-power in Taiwan since 2010. It showed an increasing trend from 2.0615 NT\$/kW-h in 2010 to 5.1176 NT\$/kW-h in 2021 for the biomass-to-power by anaerobic digestion. The

MOEA will open up the business model for the direct supply and transfer of green power generation, and also guarantee the fixed 20-year rate which renewable electricity can be converted at the feed-in tariff (FIT) officially announced.


**Table 6.** Variations of feed-in tariff (FIT) for biomass-to-power and waste-to-power in Taiwan since 2010.

<sup>a</sup> 1 NT\$ <sup>≈</sup> 0.035 US\$ (2020).

In order to diversify food waste treatment options and also reduce the burdens on the MSW incineration plants and sanitary landfills in Taiwan, the EPA revised the relevant regulation ("Regulations for Collection, Clean-up and Treatment of General Waste") on 3 November 2017 and announced the new regulation ("Management Regulations for Reuse of Common Industrial Waste") on 8 January 2018. The former regulation added the energy recovery of food waste and other organic residues to one of the specified treatment methods. The food waste and waste cooking oil were listed for the industrial waste reuse items in the latter regulation. Their reuse options have been listed in Table 4. Afterwards, the EPA further launched the Resource Recycling and Reuse Plan in 2018, which was based on the cross-departmental action strategies and promotion measures under the Taiwan's SDGs [10]. In this regards, the EPA has assisted five municipal governments to build food waste bioenergy plants since 2018, which will be further addressed as a case study to discuss their environmental and economic benefits in the subsequent section.
