[quote=“Hobart”]A lot of people (including me) complain about different aspects of living in Taipei, but you must commend Taipei City for their recycling program. First the usuary tax on garbage in the form of buying the plastic bags with the tax already included. That is much better an idea than using land tax or sales tax or income tax for trash fees. Taxing people that don’t have home pickup for others home pickup is not fair.
Then they tell you that recycling is free of charge which forces this penny pinching society to try to recycle as much as possible. Nice reason to buy a trash compactor.[/quote]
The suburb I lived in when I was in Australia was very good on the recycling front - households divided their garbage up into recyclables and non-recyclables, and divided the recyclables up into metals, plastics, and paper/card.
But I’ve not seen anything in Australia to beat Taipei City’s recycling scheme. What amazes me is that even the bins in the MRT and the fast food outlets divided up their garbage in the same way.
Be careful with recycling that’s identifiably yours, such as envelopes.
Yesterday my roommate got a call from the environmental police or whatever. Seems a load of trash had been illegally dumped somewhere in Taoyuan - we live in Taipei - and they found paper with our address in it.
What I think happened is my roommate let one of the old folks who wait by the recycling truck take our load of paper. Some of the paper then must have found its way into the massive loads of trash generated by Monday night’s sidewalk party in front of our apartment (end-of-year bash for the company next door). They dumped all their trash up in Taoyuan to avoid paying for garbage bags (the police photographed their truck in the act apparently… i’ll have to ask my roommate about that though) and, voila, we are getting calls from the police. Now they want us to go up to Taoyuan and help our satanic neighbors clean it up.
I’m all for ignoring them. Do you figure they could make us pay a fine?
Oh yes… to be specific, I suspect the neighbors may have deliberately placed the trash identifying us with the load they dumped.
And it seems the enviro police don’t suspect us now, so as far as I can tell, justice is running its course. The neighbors will have to go clean up what they dumped. Taiwan just gets better and better!
[quote=“joesax”]You could do a Willie Nelson and convert it into biodiesel! billingsgazette.com/index.ph … y-fuel.inc
Just joking.[/quote]Hmm. I wonder if anyone here has caught on to the idea yet. The making of biodiesel got so popular in the UK the cops took to busting anyone with a suspicious smelling exhaust… for tax evasion. :rolleyes:
On a technical note, it might be hard to get cooking oil with low enough water content for conversion, given the humidity.
My boyfriend tried to take our paper recycling out on Monday, which we understand to be the right day. He said the recycling guys wouldn’t take it though. Does anyone have any idea why? We had it all in a big plastic bag and were just going to empty that into the truck. Does it have to be bundled or something? Also, are the recycling and compost taken away in the same truck?
[quote=“dosvog2002”]The two recycling trucks pulled up near the garbage truck and the bags of recycled stuff were subsiquently lobbed into the compacter along with all the other trash. She enquired about the practice and the offending guys uncomfortably said that “it’s standard practice.”[/quote]This is tragic, but it’s true. The EPA figured it would be such a battle to get people to sort their garbage they started to require it long before they had any way to deal with recyclables. Hopefully the facilities will soon catch up with the public’s willingness to go along with it.
Can someone tell me just how much trouble garbage and recycling is in Taiwan? I’m in Japan currently, and here it is a major time-consuming pain. Some of my elderly neighbors with not much to do have become self-appointed “garbage checkers”. If I accidentally put an item out on the wrong day I find the whole bag back on my doorstep for re-sorting. I often find bags of other peoples’ garbage on my doorstep , because they assume only foreigners make mistakes.
So can somebody give me a brief rundown on what I will be dealing with in Taipei? i.e. better or worse than here?
Violet - to answer your question, garbage/recycling might be more or less troublesome depending on where you live. The basic system in Taipei is pretty simple. All garbage must be thrown out in specific bags that you purchase (for a hefty sum). Recycling must be sorted and certain things can be brought out on certain days (there’s an English schedule available). The difficult part - I find - is that you have to run stuff out to the trucks and in my part of town I never know when the trucks are coming. Which brings me to a question for…
Fellow Taipei dwellers - Due to my teaching schedule, I am never able to get my recycling out to the damn trucks. Are there depots where I can drop off my heaps of recyclables?
Here’s one I’m wondering about. The milk cartons are supposedly recyclable so I recycle them but I’m sure it goes back in the garbage down the line. I’m talking about the milk cartons with the plastic cap on them. Is someone actually hired to cut out the plastic spout on all the milk cartons in order to recycle both the plastic and the cardboard?
[quote=“zealflyer”]
Fellow Taipei dwellers - Due to my teaching schedule, I am never able to get my recycling out to the damn trucks. Are there depots where I can drop off my heaps of recyclables?[/quote]
Don’t know of any recycling depots, but in my neighborhood, the garbage trucks come by at three different times between 6 and 11 p.m., albeit different locations. But all three are within a 2-min walk from my place. My advice is listen for the garbage truck music when you’re home. There may just be another time at another nearby location you don’t know about. or alternatively, you can go to your Li Zhang (neighborhood chief) and ask about any other pickup times and locations.
My neighborhood has a chief? This is news to me. How do I find them? I swear that there doesn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason to the garbage truck’s schedule. Maybe this chief can fill me in.
[quote]My advice is listen for the garbage truck music when you’re home.[/quote] Geez! That’s a terrible advice if I may. I had a thing with the garbage song when I first came out to Taiwan. It made my teeth grind it annoyed me so much. Now I don’t even hear it anymore. My wife gets mad at me for that now too.
The city is divided into different districts, and eah district is further divided into neighborhoods, or li, each of which has a li zhang (neighborhood chief), who is employed by the city to take care of the neighborhood and its residents. To find your li zhang, go to the website of your district office (e.g., I’m in DaAn District), and you can figure out which li you’re in by checking the map and find your li zhang’s address and phone number. I hear these guys get a pretty handsome salary from the city so they should act as your civil servants. Good luck.
