Children in today's Taiwan were born into a world infiltrated by plastic bags and styrofoam products. It may be difficult for them to imagine a life without styrofoam. However, Taipei City's Bureau of Environmental Protection is now planning to ban the use of styrofoam food containers and utensils.
The ban will probably seriously clash with the values and attitudes of Taipei citizens. The policy also highlights a conflict between individuals' awareness of environmental protection and government policies or the private sector's business policies.
The government hopes to encourage environmental protection and raise environmental consciousness through public promotions. However, experience has shown us that, without a coordinated policy and management system, pleas to individual ethics are usually in vain.
For example, the recording industry has been relying for many years on increasingly fancy packaging and gift offers such as backpacks, notebooks and key chains (which while "free" are nevertheless paid for by the consumer in the end) to promote sales. These gimmicks are wrong from an environmental protection standpoint.
But these days it seems that the only thing people can do to boycott environmentally unfriendly products -- such as Chinese moon cakes wrapped in multiple layers of packaging -- is to refuse to buy them. There is just no other way around it.
Another example is the insistence of book and record stores on wrapping items purchased at their store, allegedly to prevent theft, although we have told them we don't need any extra paper or plastic wrappings.
We can bring our own food containers and utensils when we eat out, but this creates a lot of inconvenience when we eat at cafeterias where food is sold by weight.
I ride a bicycle to school for environmental reasons, but I must put up with the exhaust fumes pumped out by the traffic. A riverside drive is reserved strictly for automobiles and I have to take an alternative route. School campuses have parking lots, but bicycles are not allowed in them.
Other examples abound. The consumption of canned soda is naturally high in schools without drinking fountains. Without water-conservation toilets, each trip to the toilet, even if just to urinate, results in the use of several liters of water. All-you-can-eat restaurants indirectly encourage people to eat to excess. People are used to cheap film development services, because these shops do not include the cost of the pollution they create in developing film into their prices. These examples demonstrate that designing an environmentally friendly environment is far more important and effective than trying to encourage self-discipline among individuals.
More than 20 years ago, the Department of Health widely publicized the horror of hepatitis and the risk of contracting the disease through shared food containers and utensils. Under the coordinated efforts of the government and experts, restaurants' and street vendors' food containers and utensils were replaced by styrofoam alternatives within a short period of time.
Walk into any school cafeteria, you will see each student using a paper plate for food, a styrofoam bowl for rice, another styrofoam bowl for soup and a pair of disposable chop sticks wrapped in a plastic. A meal may cost only NT$50, but it creates a large amount of non-biodegradable trash.
Yes, sanitation in Taiwan has improved greatly and Type A Hepatitis is no longer a nightmare. However, transmission of Type B Hepatitis, the disease that plagues the greatest number of Taiwanese, has nothing to do with shared food containers and utensils. It is contracted by contact with bodily fluids, especially blood, through activities such as tattooing, ear piercing and intravenous injection.
However, Taiwan's chemical conglomerates have already made a fortune and the public has gotten into the habit of using styrofoam products. The non-bio-degradable trash we produce will continue to pollute the environment for generations to come.
The Bureau of Environmental Protection plans to promote a recycling policy. However, the subsidies that the businesspeople get from recycling styrofoam products are limited. Delivery and cleaning styrofoam products consume resources and produces pollution. Incinerating styrofoam products, on the other hand, produces poisonous gases. Therefore, the most fundamental solution should begin with the reduction in and even a ban on the use of styrofoam.
The government has not decided to impose a flat out ban, allegedly because of concerns about the problems this would cause styrofoam manufacturers. However, are the profits of manufacturers more important than the sustaining the quality of our environment?
The Bureau of Environmental Protection has declared that it will gradually ban the use of styrofoam food containers. To keep these non-bio-degradable products from polluting the environment for future generations, we hope that the bureau will be able to overcome the difficulties and enforce this policy.
Hopefully, soon we will no longer have to feel guilty when eating in a place that uses styrofoam containers or roam the streets in search of a restaurant that does not use such products.
Bih Hergn-dar is an associate professor of the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning at National Taiwan University.
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