Starting Jan. 1 next year, the ban will be expanded to another 80,000 retailers with the aim of reducing plastic bag use by 1.5 billion per year, EPA officials said during a report to Premier Lin Chuan (林全).
Will we ever see wet market stalls not provide plastic bags?
Pharmacies, medical equipment stores, retailers of computers, consumer electronics and communications products, book and stationery stores, laundries, beverage stores, and bakeries will be prohibited from offering free plastic bags to customers, or will risk a fine of NT$1,200 (US$39) to NT$6,000, the EPA said.
Protest against people protesting against pollution. Instead of starting a green committee, start a brown one dedicated to polluting. Whether it is not picking up your dog`s shit on a public street, the joy of letting one rip in a confined space, or purposely ruining recycling sorting, be proud to be brown!!!
The majority of carbon pollution comes from the production, not transportation, of produce. Go to Google Scholar and search “food miles” and read some studies if you don’t believe me. Also, large agribusinesses do things more efficiently than small local producers do. A paragraph from Wikipedia reads:
According to German researchers, the food miles concept misleads consumers because the size of transportation and production units is not taken into account. Using the methodology of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in accordance with ISO 14040, entire supply chains providing German consumers with food were investigated, comparing local food with food of European and global provenance. Large-scale agriculture reduces unit costs associated with food production and transportation, leading to increased efficiency and decreased energy use per kilogram of food by economies of scale. Research from the Justus Liebig University Giessen show that small food production operations may cause even more environmental impact than bigger operations in terms of energy use per kilogram, even though food miles are lower.
Can I copy and paste onto Facebook?
Because I think you are so close to the truth
Human being don’t care about what is right
but is so angry against the wrong!
See my boy riding bicycle around the island
to tell me -by phone- how drivers don’t care about riders
Every single bicycle is a human, but who cares?
Taiwan, Europe, USA, everywhere…
Don’t eat meat.
Eat less meat.
Have less children.
Don’t drive a car.
Live in the city.
Don’t fly.
Buy secondhand stuff.
It’s possible to live a very low impact life if one really wanted to.
But an individual can make a way bigger impact if they can campaign to change governnent policies. Government have their hands on most of the levers.
In Taiwan its governnent agencies like the ministry of economic affairs who are actually wrecking the place!
Whenever I see green fanatics lecture with a religious fervour bordering on Wahabbism type of militancy, I remember what the great CS Lewis once said about moral busybodies: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
Someone already posted above about aloe, an excellent indoor filter and oxygen releaser, but I’ll add that pretty much any sort of houseplants will save your indoor environment. Forgive me for citing Wikipedia, but if you google “NASA clean air study”, you can see plenty of info about the best plants for filtering out all sorts of chemicals and bad things for your health. NASA clean air study
The best part is that a lot of the plants listed grow outdoors in Taiwan, and are super low maintence, so you can just ask a local shop or friendly neighbor for a snipping of their devil’s Ivy or snake plant and propagate your own in a glass of water that you change every once and while. (Aloe needs soil, however. I don’t think it would last in just water
I started growing devil’s Ivy up the grate on my window in hopes of contributing to the filtering of outside air. I like the mini forest feel and would like to believe that maybe my AC isn’t working as hard to keep my apartment cool. Maybe I’m crazy, but every little bit counts!
You got it right. Recycling, packaging etc is just a drop in the ocean compared to the positive benefits of less private motor vehicles. Really they are just feel good measures because governments don’t dare to deal with the real problem.
You can’t take people’s scooters away, but at least cut the subsidies that keeps petroleum so cheap. All across the world people are selfish and cheap, if scooter riding became more expensive and less convenient, people would walk,cycle and take public transport more. Parking spaces for scooters and cars should be reduced and the cost of parking for non-electric vehicles put in place. Also a congestion charge in Taipei city centre .
Couple that with more buses, bike lanes and incentives for companies to install showers for cyclists and you have a much much cleaner and more pleasant country to live in.
make an article about how backwards the country is regards to scooters and get it shared by someone big? making the country lose face is the only way i think anything will happen. losing face is worse than the scooter /pollution problem itself.
Absolutely this. Parked scooters are one of the biggest cancers in Taiwan. They make being a pedestrian a nightmare. Don’t see why they should be getting so much space, so cheaply.
Good idea. But, will it work? Make people pay for parking, then couple that with a horribly inadequate police force (outside of Taipei. I am talking outside of Taipei) then people will simply start parking 3 deep on the streets, until streets are clogged like an obese’s artery.
In many cases, they will block intersections and other streets. On occasion the city will have its two police officers write tickets, but I guess fine enforcement is weak or non-existent, because many people just toss the ticket on the street. Then there is always that one AH who wants to pay his parking ticket(s) with a bag of NT$1 coins at 7-11 during lunch.
So much space? We are given a slot barely the size of the machine. And only a few at that. And since people want to squeeze in where ever they can, they cram themselves into your space. Dedicated scooter parking is fine, but there needs to be more of it. But…then you have the asshat car drivers who park in scooter spaces.
