Taiwan's Musical Solution to Plastic Pollution
- tapfineart
- Jul 9, 2024
- 4 min read
This video shows the yellow trash truck and the white recycle truck
moving through clean streets as they play classical music.
Many Americans associate musical trucks with the childhood thrill of running towards ice cream, but Taiwan has adults running towards garbage trucks.
Taiwan used to be called “Garbage Island” due to its terrible waste problem in the '80s and '90s, resulting in streets littered with piles of garbage. In 1993 it only collected 70% of waste, nothing was recycled, and the uncollected 30% of waste lined the streets. The small island was literally being submerged in its own filth.
The government's response was to build incinerators and burn it all. But in 1987 a group of ten women, called Homemakers United, changed everything. They brought their trash and statistics to a meeting with their Environmental Protection Agency to petition for a municipal recycling system. They showed that of municipal waste, 40% could be recycled while 35% could be composted. By 1988 Taiwan was legislating its Waste Disposal Act, known as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), holding manufacturers and importers financially responsible for recycling. It calculates the real cost of product disposal and successfully has them contributing to or forming associations to fund recycling.
Individuals are required to purchase official blue bags for trash as part of the Pay as You Throw program, but recycling is free; naturally, this highly encourages recycling. The yellow garbage trucks are followed by white open-bed recycle trucks where employees and volunteers help sort recyclable household waste into categories like plastics, paper, cooked or raw food waste, etc. To make this accessible, the yellow trucks circulate twice a day several times a week (five nights a week with over 4,000 pick spots in the city of Taipei). In addition to classical music, there is also an app that tracks their location and sends notifications when one is close by. If one still can’t make it out to the trucks, there are waste disposal booths that can be accessed anytime and add value to public transit cards.
Due to the legislation and policies in place, Taiwan has rapidly gone from a “Garbage Island” to having a record-breaking recycling rate of 55% while dropping daily waste disposal by 0.75 kilograms per person since 1998 (that’s about 1.7 pounds per person). That is half as much waste per person per day as in the United States. These legislations and policies have prevented millions of tons of waste from being incinerated. Today, Taiwan is one of the top leaders in the world on a path to zero waste (including Germany, South Korea, Austria, and more), thanks to ten ladies who spoke up about their environmental concerns.
But the women of Homemakers United did more than just encourage their government to make changes. Additionally, a huge cultural shift took place, challenging and altering the way the people of Taiwan think and act regarding waste.
It makes one wonder if similar things would be possible in the United States. Like most American cities and towns, trash, recycling, and yard waste each have their own bin that is put on the street once a week, where it is usually picked up at the crack of dawn or during business hours. Waste management is an “out of sight, out of mind” concept in the United States. Unfortunately, for places like Daly City (and I’m sure other coastal towns), the strong ocean winds allow much of the trash and recycling to take flight as it moves from the bin to the collection trucks. The amount of trash on the streets is shocking.
I’m picking on Daly City because after grad school I found myself living there. Having grown up in the North Bay and hearing that the City of San Francisco banned plastic bags while I was living elsewhere, I expected to see clean streets. But Daly City (a suburb just south of SF) is covered in trash. Upon moving to San Francisco a few months later, I found the same problem. Trash-lined streets, despite what appears to be endless efforts of street sweepers and municipal workers with brooms and tongs walking about filling their waste carts.
Surely, taking up a system that prevents trash from ever touching the ground, as in Taiwan, could be exceptionally helpful in the United States. The funding methods that Taiwan employs can also serve as a model for creating more recycling infrastructure in the United States, such as employees, facilities, additional trucks, composting, etc. not to mention music selection.
Americans are highly invested in their linear economy --- buy new, use a little bit, throw it out, repeat. Of course, this is perpetuated by a "keeping up with the Jones's" mentality and planned obsolescence (products intentionally designed to only last a short time). Convenience is King in the United States. So, in an effort to help with the cultural shift that would need to take place in the US, why not make it fun? The garbage truck tracking app could let everyone vote on music every two weeks. This would add an element of community engagement and could even feature local musicians. Further, people could track what products or stores result in the most plastic waste and pressure those producers to find alternatives. Thus, we have another avenue for collective action.
Any country that says it prioritizes pollution and climate change issues should take notes and make appropriate changes. Not only does trash cause negative ecological impacts when it lands in forests or oceans or rivers, but landfills themselves take up a lot of space that could be vital habitat or housing or agriculture or any number of other important land uses.
What Taiwan has achieved shows the world it can be done, and it can be done well. With the rise of municipal waste expected to reach 3.4 billion tonnes by 2050, the time is now.
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