A Singaporean community leader on Saturday said that the city-state could learn from Taipei when it comes to keeping its streets clean, praising the Taiwanese capital for its cleanliness.
William Wan, general secretary of the non-profit Singapore Kindness Movement, wrote in an opinion piece in the Singapore-based Straits Times that perhaps the city-state has “too many cleaners” and that this has spoiled Singaporeans. He called for an end to the city-state’s “vicious circle of littering.”
The cofounder of the Keep Singapore Clean Movement lamented in the article that last week’s New Year Day celebrations saw more garbage littered on the streets of Singapore than in the previous three years, with Styrofoam cups, bottles and cigarette packs discarded only a meter from empty trashcans.
In comparison, Wan said that Taipei “is much cleaner than [Singapore], even though there are very few rubbish bins in public places.”
Singapore has a population of about 5 million and employs 70,000 cleaners, while Taipei has less than 3 million residents, but only 5,000 cleaners, Wan wrote in the article.
He added that when Keep Singapore Clean representatives visited Taipei weeks ago, their hosts had explained the phenomenon by saying: “We clean up after ourselves.”
The Chinese-language Apple Daily reported that the crowds at last week’s New Year’s celebrations in Taipei had produced about 19.47 tonnes of trash, all of which was cleaned up in one hour by 562 sanitation workers and about 1,000 volunteers.
The previous year, the Taiwan Environmental Information Center estimates that the about 1.16 million people rang in the new year in Taipei produced 22.63 tonnes of trash.
In the 2013 celebrations, about 850,000 revelers produced 14.09 tonnes of trash, the nonprofit group said on its Web site.
Except for the areas around markets, public trash cans are rare on Taipei’s crowded streets, but littering is uncommon because handling one’s own trash is considered a civic responsibility.
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