Taiwan's Rubbish

Taiwan is a small island and as such has no space for dumps and piles of rubbish. With most inhabitants living in apartment buildings and flats, communal bins, if they are even available, fill up fast. For many years Taiwan was known for its bags of rubbish rotting on pavements with rats swarming around, happily living off the waste of the Taiwanese.

Until five years ago when along came the musical rubbish truck with some rules on rubbish and recycling. Every evening a rubbish truck will pass along the city streets playing its easily recognisable tune, calling all inhabitants out of their homes with their blue bags of rubbish. Except it isn’t all just rubbish. Blue bags contain waste that is only fit for the dump. Plastics, metals and papers are deposited into the correct receptacles and food waste is separated into a third vessel. Certain days call for certain recyclables. And what if you bring plastics on paper day? Expect a mini lecture on the importance of recycling but your plastics will still be accepted.

  

  

The blue rubbish bags are all part of the scheme. These bags have to be paid for to discourage creating too much garbage. This idea is fairer than suggestions of a flat rate charge for too much rubbish as proposed in other countries such as Britain. The more junk you create the more money you pay. I am unsure of the sustainability of these plastic sacks however. Do they biodegrade? Could another material be more environmental?

Another incentive created by these (possibly questionable) blue bags is to separate your waste from your recyclables. The less non-reusable and non-compostable waste the less money spent on blue bags.

So onto the kitchen waste. This all gets slopped into a container on the truck and 75% gets sold to pig farmers with the remaining sum used as fertiliser. The pig farmers pick out the dangerous fish bones and other inedibles, boil it all up and feed it to their pigs.

It might sound like a lot of dirty work sorting out your waste into these three piles but most people already sort out rubbish from recycling and a growing number of people have compost bins. In a hot country such a Taiwan, this daily sort helps to keep down the abundance of cockroaches and rats that infest their overflowing bins. The evening collection also serves as a sociable community pastime where everyone congregates on the streets and catches up with friends and neighbours.

Image from: Cracking The Egg

 But it isn’t just enforced at home, restaurants and workplaces are also required to separate out their trash. Including McDonalds.

 

Of course, it has its flaws. People who are not around when the rubbish trucks melodically pass by miss out and therefore need to find another way to rid themselves of their rubbish. Public bins are often stuffed with blue bags of litter leading to the reduced amount of dustbins on the street. Others sneak their junk to work to avoid it piling up at home. But what plan isn’t without blemishes?

One of the key successes of this ‘trash doesn’t touch the ground’ scheme is that the relatively small area of Taiwan means that the sale of city approved rubbish bags can exist.  Government issue bin bags here in Britain would be ignored in favour of the cheapest or the newly celebrity endorsed bin bag. This idea would need a few changes to survive in Britain but I believe it could have an impact. We don’t need daily refuse collection – and the budget wouldn’t allow it, all houses and apartment buildings have sufficient sized collection bins and we have a recycling bin system in place. The problem being that most people ignore or abuse it. It still surprises me when I open our recycling bin and see teabags, clingfilm and, more bizarrely but only the once, bubblewrap.  But with so many different types of plastic in production for packaging food, shampoo and whatever the bubblewrap was previously protecting, it’s no wonder that people get confused, or more likely frustrated, and just dump anything in there. The collection of kitchen waste would dramatically reduce the contents of Britain’s bin bags with it being a well known fact that we throw away a considerable portion of the food we buy.

The system in Taiwan means that the Taiwanese produce the least amount of un-reusable waste per person than any other developed country. It has helped clean up their streets and more importantly taught the country about recycling with every resident responsible for every bottle, every fish bone and every plastic bag they use.