The Garbage Collectors Of Taiwan
If you’re like me, you have fond memories of the ice cream truck. It would be a hot summer day when even the birds were hiding in the shade when all of a sudden, a song would sneak into the neighborhood. The sound was a warning. It provided just enough time to ask your parents for money and get out to the street with every other kid on the block to wait for the festive truck and its promise of frosty relief.
I can distinctly remember the sights and sounds of the truck coming to my neighborhood as a child and parking right outside of my house. I remember the look on my dad’s face when he heard the music too. I remember the crowd of other kids, most of whom I had yet to meet, all coming together around the white truck with the flavors advertised on the side. I couldn’t have been much more than 3-years-old, (we moved from that house shortly after,) but these memories have stuck with me and come up whenever the summer turns particularly summery.
Put a pin in that thought. Let’s talk about how Taiwan takes care of its garbage.
Taiwan, for those who don’t know, is an island. Being an island makes getting rid of your waste a difficult proposition. As the island began to industrialize, it was producing more waste than it could handle. Incinerators were used to help, but at full capacity, they could only take care of 10% of the island’s waste leaving the rest for landfills, (Again, it’s an island, so that’s not a great solution.) Taiwan tried to establish a recycling program to combat the issue in the late ‘80s but it quickly became corrupt and ineffective.
In recent decades, Taiwan has taken a number of focused and specific steps to combat their waste management problem. There have been some standard changes like restructuring the committees that supervise both waste and recycling processing. There are some less standard changes like a highly regulated and detailed recycling program. (They have 13 categories of recyclable items.)
A lot of the changes Taiwan made were designed to make the people more involved in their waste. This is one of the reasons that trash is picked up at designated collection sites, not at the curb. It’s a like a bus station but for your garbage instead of your visiting cousin.
The other difference between their disposal system and ours is that as the trucks come to pick up your waste, the trucks play music. Sometimes it’s seasonal music, sometimes it’s a Beethoven composition, in some cases they even teach short English lessons as an alert to everyone that waste is being taken care of. They have taken a required component of living in a modern society and treated it like selling ice cream.
As much as it tickles me to think of young children rushing out the door, garbage in hand, because they heard “Camptown Races” playing around the corner, there is a bigger point to this. Taiwan is setting recycling and energy production standards for its region because it made garbage collection a festive and engaged part of its citizens’ lives. An individual doesn’t passively leave a bag at the end of the driveway, they must actively take it to a site.
Our civil services are often judged by how passively we can engage with them. What if they required more participation on our part? What if we had to engage the systems that make modern life possible? What if music drew our attention to more than just ice cream?
