Taiwanese residents holding plastic bags of rubbish stand on a footpath as a yellow garbage truck playing classical music over a loudspeaker pulls up.
For decades, the tinkling of Beethoven’s Fur Elise or Tekla Badarzewska-Baranowska’s Maiden’s Prayer has alerted Taiwanese households to take out their garbage.
Like clockwork, residents emerge from their apartment buildings carrying bags of pre-sorted rubbish as the musical garbage trucks approach.
Photos: AFP
“When we hear this music, we know it’s time to take out the trash. It’s very convenient,” 78-year-old Lee Shu-ning said as she waited outside her tower block in Taipei.
Residents toss plastic bags of general refuse into the yellow compaction truck, and tip food waste and recycling into bins carried by another vehicle. For the elderly, taking out the trash has become a social event and many arrive early to sit and talk around the collection points.
“I can chat with some old neighbors and friends, it’s nice,” Lee said, before disposing of several bottles and cans.
Photo: AFP
“It’s also a kind of exercise,” she added.
But not everyone is a fan.
“I think it’s quite inconvenient because it comes at a fixed time every day,” said 31-year-old beautician Dai Yun-wei after dumping her rubbish in the truck.
Photo: AFP
“Sometimes we’re not home or we’re busy, so we can’t throw away the trash.”
SAVING TIME
Taiwan’s musical garbage trucks have been an almost daily feature of life since the 1960s, said Shyu Shyh-shiun of Taipei’s Department of Environmental Protection.
Taiwan imported German garbage trucks pre-programmed with Fur Elise, Shyu said, but added it was not clear how the Maiden’s Prayer became part of the repertoire.
The trucks operate five days a week, usually in the late afternoon and evening. Yang Xiu-ying, 76, has made a living out of helping her neighbors dispose of their garbage. She receives NT$11,200 (US$380) a month from 28 households in her lane to sort their trash, load it onto a trolley and take it to the refuse trucks.
“Some people get off work late, some elderly people find it inconvenient, so they take it downstairs and I dump the garbage for them,” Yang said, wearing two layers of gloves and long protective sleeves.
Others have turned to digital solutions for their rubbish problem. The young founders of Tracle created an app enabling people to book a time for their trash to be taken away.
“I think our value is that we save a lot of time for them,” co-founder Ben Chen said. “We enhance their life quality.”
CLEANING UP
Over the past 30 years, Taiwan has been cleaning up its waste management act.
An economic boom had led to an explosion of garbage, with almost no recycling, landfills overflowing and people protesting air and ground pollution. In response, the island ramped up recycling, increased incineration and made people responsible for sorting and dumping their own trash in the trucks instead of leaving it on the ground for collection.
Taipei residents are also required to buy government-approved blue plastic bags for their general waste to encourage them to use less and recycle more.
“In the beginning, everybody feels... that it’s not very convenient,” Shyu said.
But once people started noticing the cleaner streets, “they feel this is a good policy.”
The city’s recycling rate has surged to nearly 67 percent, from two percent in 2000, and the amount of garbage sent for incineration has fallen by two-thirds, Shyu said.
And, he said, smiling, the trucks are “almost” always on time.
Last week the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) announced that the legislature would again amend the Act Governing the Allocation of Government Revenues and Expenditures (財政收支劃分法) to separate fiscal allocations for the three outlying counties of Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu from the 19 municipalities on Taiwan proper. The revisions to the act to redistribute the national tax revenues were passed in December last year. Prior to the new law, the central government received 75 percent of tax revenues, while the local governments took 25 percent. The revisions gave the central government 60 percent, and boosted the local government share to 40 percent,
Many will be surprised to discover that the electoral voting numbers in recent elections do not entirely line up with what the actual voting results show. Swing voters decide elections, but in recent elections, the results offer a different and surprisingly consistent message. And there is one overarching theme: a very democratic preference for balance. SOME CAVEATS Putting a number on the number of swing voters is surprisingly slippery. Because swing voters favor different parties depending on the type of election, it is hard to separate die-hard voters leaning towards one party or the other. Complicating matters is that some voters are
Sept 22 to Sept 28 Hsu Hsih (許石) never forgot the international student gathering he attended in Japan, where participants were asked to sing a folk song from their homeland. When it came to the Taiwanese students, they looked at each other, unable to recall a single tune. Taiwan doesn’t have folk songs, they said. Their classmates were incredulous: “How can that be? How can a place have no folk songs?” The experience deeply embarrassed Hsu, who was studying music. After returning to Taiwan in 1946, he set out to collect the island’s forgotten tunes, from Hoklo (Taiwanese) epics to operatic
Five years ago, on the verge of the first COVID lockdown, I wrote an article asking what seemed to be an extremely niche question: why do some people invert their controls when playing 3D games? A majority of players push down on the controller to make their onscreen character look down, and up to make them look up. But there is a sizable minority who do the opposite, controlling their avatars like a pilot controls a plane, pulling back to go up. For most modern games, this requires going into the settings and reconfiguring the default controls. Why do they
RSS