Taiwan used to absorb much of its waste into an extensive recycling industry, explains Fang, secretary-general of the Green Consumers' Foundation. “Before 1980, there was a huge recycling business in Taiwan. We recycled almost everything: cable lines, computers.”
But that recycling industry has broken down over the past decade. First, the market for recycled materials dwindled as prices of raw materials fell internationally, spurring local manufacturers to buy original resources rather than using recycled ones. Then, local spending habits changed with the sudden increase in buying power, and businesses rushed to appeal to the shifting tastes.
Unfortunately, many of the new business practices resulted in consumer waste. Snack-food vendors replaced reusable utensils with disposable wooden chopsticks and styrofoam trays. Supermarkets sought to draw customers with flashy displays of produce wrapped in plastic. Canned soft drinks replaced homebrewed tea as the best drink to offer house guests.
The volume of municipal solid waste produced daily in Taiwan is now growing by 6 percent per year and shows no signs of slowing. But the EPA and conservation groups stress that recycling could substantially reduce Taiwan's garbage. About 42 percent of the island's municipal solid waste is recoverable. Paper and plastic products alone make up one-third of the household garbage collected.
Under the Solid Waste Disposal Act, manufacturers and government environmental agencies are jointly recycling liter-sized PET (polyethylene terephthalate) soft drink bottles, tires, cans, agricultural pesticide containers, and mercury and lead batteries. Plans are in the works to add paper, glass, cars, motorcycles, aseptic pack (foil-lined drink cartons), and plastic to the list. The most extensive recycling program is for PET bottles. Today, consumers can return them for a NT$2 refund, at 13,500 convenience stores around the island. According to the EPA, 40 percent of the PET bottles produced in 1992 were recycled.
But most other items are tougher to recycle. The island's first curbside recycling project ended in failure last December when the only public recycling bins-1,500 so-called igloo receptacles-were removed from Taipei and Kaohsiung after a three-year trial run. The brightly colored, dome-shaped bins had become unpopular with environmental groups because they were expensive, inefficient, and were operated by a beverage manufacturing association that was given a monopoly on recycling the materials collected. No alternative recycling receptacles have been introduced.
With the igloos off the streets, the public has two alternatives for recycling. Families with school-age kids can take advantage of the growing number of schools that have begun collecting paper, metal cans, and some plastics. But the only option for most people is to leave recyclables with the rest of their household trash, in the hopes that it will be picked up by one of the many private “scavengers” who collect recyclables via bicycle or hand cart and resell them to distributors.
But these individual collectors are disappearing from the streets. The main problem is that profits for recyclable materials are falling. Glass bottles, for example, fetch only about NT$1 per kilogram after deducting collection and transportation costs. Another obstacle is that scavenging is not a legal profession because it is not monitored and therefore cannot be taxed. As such, it is discouraged by the government. The current number of street collectors is uncertain-depending on who you ask, 100 to 30,000 work in Taipei alone. But environmentalists and government officials agree that the number is dwindling fast.
For generations, “scavengers” gathered household recyclables. Now, their numbers are falling due to lower profits. Who or what will replace them?
If the street collectors go, how can the public recycle? The EPA's, solution is neighborhood recycling programs funded by local governments. A pilot project began in April 1992 in the Taipei suburb of Neihu, where the Taipei city government's Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) designated drop-off sites for certain recyclables once a week. Paper, bottles, plastics, and clothing are collected on a fixed monthly schedule.
In a survey of 1,800 Neihu residents taken two months after the project launch, 97 percent knew of the program and 50 percent said they participate in it every week. Today, the program has spread from Neihu into twenty-four li (small neighborhood districts) in Taipei, and the DEP collects one hundred metric tons of recyclable garbage on each pick-Up day.
This summer, the department plans to expand the program to 170 of Taipei's 440 Ii, and to operate citywide by the year 2000. Their goal is to see the city's annual garbage growth rate fall from 10 percent to zero by 2006.
The program cost NT$10 million (US$400.000) for the first year and is expected to be twice that when expanded this year. The DEP has hired 140 full-time sorters and collectors, and it is now lobbying to purchase a U.S.-made sorting machine and sixteen new collection trucks for a total of NT$32.5 million (US$1.3 million).
Environmentalists and street collectors charge that the program is costly and ineffective, pointing out that if the government supported the scavengers, they would gather and sort recyclables much more cheaply. Instead, the street collectors who used to work in Neihu are now out of a job.
Shih Shuo-jen (史碩仁), vice general manager of Taiwan Waste Material Collection, Transport, and Marketing Cooperative, an association of street collectors, is especially critical of the government project. He claims that the Neihu recycling program actually collects only 60 metric tons a month and is squeezing out a working recycling system at the same time. “Even though the original method of recycling is declining, we still have the most efficient system in the world,” Shih says. He claims that each day his association's members collect 500 to 800 metric tons of waste paper in Taipei alone each day.
Shih also criticizes the government industry recycling programs such as the PET system. According to him, PET bottles make up less than 1 percent of the total amount of garbage recycled, while paper-which is primarily recycled by scavengers-accounts for 40 percent of the total volume. Yet the government has received a lot of media attention for the PET system.
In response, Taipei city officials say they are considering including the scavengers in the Neihu program. And there is a movement to legalize street collecting.
Environmentalists say the most important factor in developing a strong recycling system is to make it a good business. Jay Fang says there is a demand for such materials, but business conditions make local items financially unattractive. One problem is that recyclers can get several types of materials more cheaply from foreign suppliers than from local ones.
“We import a lot of waste at cheap prices,” says Ho Soon-ching senior specialist at the EPA's, Solid Waste Management Bureau. “We cannot compete with foreign waste.” Taiwan imports paper, tin, aluminium, zinc, and copper, mainly from the United States and Europe. Some environmentalists even believe that overseas suppliers pay Taiwan recyclers to take their waste. The best solution, according to the EPA, will be to restrict imports. Says Ho, “In the future, we will set a limit on foreign waste coming into Taiwan.”
Shih Shuo-jen believes that the government should learn from the recycling practices of the West. “Foreign governments pay someone to take [recyclables], but the government here has the opposite view: They want people to pay for it,” he says. Currently, even products that don't face foreign competition find a sluggish market with recyclers. Shih explains that while Taiwan has a number of glass recycling plants in the northern town of Hsinchu, manufacturers seldom accept used bottles unless they are donated free and are delivered to the site. Not surprisingly, few glass bottles used by consumers are recycled.
For Fang and Shih, toning up Taiwan's recycling system boils down to making recycling financially attractive to all parties involved-from manufacturers, to consumers, to collectors and recyclers. This, they believe, is the best way to boost recycling. “Recycling is a business,” Fang says. “I believe that economic incentives are most important.” The alternative to beefing up recycling programs is sobering. Fang points out that if Taipei residents continue at their present rate of increased solid waste production, “every ten years, we will double the volume.” ■