Taiwan is very serious about trash and recycling. Trash and recycling trucks come around to every neighborhood twice a day (at scheduled times for each neighborhood), five times a week. You can't leave your trash on the street, you actually need to be there to throw it out. It's the great equalizer to see rich and poor alike, young and old, standing on the corner in their pajamas waiting for the trucks to come by so they can throw their trash in.
For the recycle truck each day is for a different thing, for example monday might be paper, while tuesday is plastic, and so on. Actually I must give them credit as it seems like now many more things are recyclable than before. when i first came here it seemed like only one or two types of plastics were considered recyclable, now all are.
To make sure that people recycle, the normal trash men can take your trash that you are ready to throw into the truck, to inspect if there are any recyclables in there, then they can fine you. I have never seen this actually happen though.
Trash is a bit of a business here too. As a few older people will go around collecting recyclables to sell to the recycling plant. it's not uncommon to be walking to the recycle truck and suddenly stopped by an old lady who is sitting on the corner waiting to collect everybody's recyclables as they walk towards the recycle truck. also larger buildings usually hire somebody to collect and sort the recyclables and take out the trash. Although i'm a bit surprised that smaller buildings and neighborhoods don't have industrious kids who go around and offer to do this for a small fee. But that's probably more because of Taiwanese culture which feels that being a student is the only job they should have and if your child has any work or part time job, than you are a failure as a parent. But before all you kids get excited about this thought, the trade off is that here in Taiwan students must go to two different schools each day for at least fourteen hours each day.
The picture above is how the government gets in on that sweet sweet trash money. In an effort to reduce the amount of trash and encourage people to recycle, the government requires all trash to be in these government bags which you can buy in packs from convenience stores. while recyclables can be in whatever container you'd like.
This wasn't always the practice. I believe it started with Taipei City, but now other places do it in what seems like more of an attempt to finance the waste department. It actually seems pretty clever, and it's not too bad, as a pack of trash bags can cost around six bucks at the most. and depending on what size you get, you can get anywhere between five and twelve bags.
Pictured above is one of the smallest sizes (5 liters in volume), which is what i normally get. Since my only non-recyclable trash is tissues (refer to the post on 3/8, to learn more about the importance of tissues in taiwan) and bags of dog poop. So i don't need a rather big bag, and with all that dog poop, i kind of want the smaller bags so i can get it out the door as soon as possible.
However I do have a few of the largest size bags (125 liters). Every now and then I clean out my apartment and get rid of larger old or broken things. Recently I had to get rid of a broken old wooden lounge chair. Yes you can call the government to make a time for them to come and pick up furniture, but....my phone ability in chinese is not very good. So i did what any crafty idiot would do. I got out my tools and took the chair apart and put the pieces into the super large trash bag.
Special thanks goes to all my friends who over the years have called the waste management department to find out if some particular thing I have is recyclable or not. It seems that I only throw out things that aren't listed on their website in either the recyclable or trash lists.
