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.
July 28 to Aug. 3 Former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) reportedly maintained a simple diet and preferred to drink warm water — but one indulgence he enjoyed was a banned drink: Coca-Cola. Although a Coca-Cola plant was built in Taiwan in 1957, It was only allowed to sell to the US military and other American agencies. However, Chiang’s aides recall procuring the soft drink at US military exchange stores, and there’s also records of the Presidential Office ordering in bulk from Hong Kong. By the 1960s, it wasn’t difficult for those with means or connections to obtain Coca-Cola from the
Taiwan is today going to participate in a world-first experiment in democracy. Twenty-four Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers will face a recall vote, with the results determining if they keep their jobs. Some recalls look safe for the incumbents, other lawmakers appear heading for a fall and many could go either way. Predictions on the outcome vary widely, which is unsurprising — this is the first time worldwide a mass recall has ever been attempted at the national level. Even meteorologists are unclear what will happen. As this paper reported, the interactions between tropical storms Francisco and Com-May could lead to
It looks like a restaurant — but it’s food for the mind. Kaohsiung’s Pier-2 Art Center is currently hosting Comic Bento (漫畫便當店), an immersive and quirky exhibition that spotlights Taiwanese comic and animation artists. The entire show is designed like a playful bento shop, where books, plushies and installations are laid out like food offerings — with a much deeper cultural bite. Visitors first enter what looks like a self-service restaurant. Comics, toys and merchandise are displayed buffet-style in trays typically used for lunch servings. Posters on the walls present each comic as a nutritional label for the stories and an ingredient
Fundamentally, this Saturday’s recall vote on 24 Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers is a democratic battle of wills between hardcore supporters of Taiwan sovereignty and the KMT incumbents’ core supporters. The recall campaigners have a key asset: clarity of purpose. Stripped to the core, their mission is to defend Taiwan’s sovereignty and democracy from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). They understand a basic truth, the CCP is — in their own words — at war with Taiwan and Western democracies. Their “unrestricted warfare” campaign to undermine and destroy Taiwan from within is explicit, while simultaneously conducting rehearsals almost daily for invasion,
RSS