The special municipality elections are four months away and the silly season is well under way. Silly ideas, extravagant projects, ill-conceived promises and a lot of trash talk are to be expected of the candidates.
Many of these campaign promises can be ignored, unless, of course, they are the ones made by the eventual winner. However, some of these ideas should be shot down as soon as they are uttered.
One that deserves instant derision was made this week by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate for Taipei mayor, Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌). On his Plurk microblog, Su said the city’s garbage bag fee policy has been so successful that it could now be scrapped.
The nation’s environmental record, for the most part, has been abysmal —- and if the protests in recent weeks about the Mailiao Township (麥寮) naphtha cracker plant are any indication, it will continue to be for a long time.
However, Taipei has led the way environmentally, for Taiwan and cities worldwide, by making people pay for plastic bags — both those for garbage and those for shopping. The results have been nothing short of miraculous.
Taipei City Government statistics show that the volume of household garbage has declined 67 percent since the bag-fee policy was imposed, an amazing feat by any standard.
While the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) likes to claim full credit for the program, which was launched during President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) first term as Taipei mayor, the impetus and foundation for the program came during his predecessor Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) four years in Taipei City Hall.
Chen’s administration revolutionized Taipei residents’ habits — beginning in 1996 when garbage bags could no longer be left on the street, but had to be thrown directly into garbage trucks, and recycling efforts were boosted. When that proved successful, his administration began a pilot program in three boroughs to charge residents by the bag for trash disposal. However, efforts to widen the bag-fee program ran afoul of city council politics and the plan was shelved.
Once Ma became mayor, he had better luck in getting the city council to back the idea. Starting in July 2000, Taipei residents had to buy specially designated bags for their non-recyclable garbage.
Despite the inconvenience of separating trash into paper, plastics, cans and kitchen waste, and then putting what is left into those blue bags, the compliance rate has grown every year. The success of the program was so rapid that just a few years after it began, city officials were able to change their target date for their “Total Recycling, Zero Landfill” goal from 2020 to this year. The last landfill in the city will close next year.
Despite these achievements, the city still tickets thousands of residents each year for failing to use the required trash bags. Many people still take advantage of the pre-Lunar New Year collections to dispose of their regular, unsorted trash, and city officials do not feel they can trust residents not to fill sidewalk trash cans with household garbage, so public trash cans — the few that exist —- still have tiny openings.
This is not the time to rest on our laurels. The per bag fee policy works because people save money by reducing the amount of trash they produce. It may be just a few NT per bag, but those bags add up — which is why making people pay for plastic shopping bags has drastically reduced the number of bags used. Take away that incentive and a regress will be inevitable.
There is a lot to find fault with in Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin’s (郝龍斌) policies, but he was right to say that it does not make sense to take a step backwards now. Neither Taipei nor the nation can afford to drop the garbage bag fee policy.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs