Residents and shopkeepers in Taipei's Zhongzheng district taking their trash out to the collection truck. The truck - accompanied by another truck that collects recyclables - calls at the Huaining Street collection point at about 5pm daily except for Wednesdays and Sundays. -- ST PHOTOS: LEE SEOK HWAI
The sounds of Fur Elise, a Beethoven score; and A Maiden's Prayer, a 19th-century tune by Polish composer Tekla Badarzewska-Baranowska, emanate from hundreds of garbage collection trucks when they make their rounds.
As if responding to a pied piper, residents and shopkeepers emerge from their homes and stores carrying trash in blue plastic bags as well as recyclables such as glass bottles to about 2,500 collection points at street corners throughout the city.
The bags go into one truck and the recyclables are sorted into their respective categories by hand into an accompanying one. The ritual is repeated daily except for Wednesdays and Sundays.
Indeed, Taipei's waste management system is unique. In just 10 years, it has helped halve the amount of waste the city produces and is becoming the envy of other cities such as Hong Kong and Shanghai.
'Hong Kong can do what Taiwan has done,' admonished an editorial in Hong Kong's Ming Pao Daily News in February after an official announcement that a new incinerator would be built on reclaimed land to process the city's ever-growing heaps of trash despite opposition by the location's residents.
'Drowning in Garbage, Jakarta Could Look to Taipei for a Clean Example' read the headline of an article in the Jakarta Globe last year.
Launched on July 1, 2000, Taipei's 'pay-as-you-throw' system compels households and businesses to put their waste in government-issued, blue garbage bags sold for NT$1.35 (six Singapore cents) to NT$45 each, depending on the size.
Recyclables must also be sorted into no fewer than seven categories: PET bottles, glass bottles, plastics, aluminium and ferrous metals, paper, food scraps, and clothes.
Municipal and private garbage teams collect only trash contained in the blue bags. Residents who use unauthorised bags can be fined up to NT$6,000. Recyclables are collected free of charge.
Many residents or shopkeepers outsource their dumping and sorting chores to private trash collectors for a monthly fee.
A decade on, the results have been staggering. The city of 2.7 million people produced 1,619 tonnes of trash a day last year compared to 3,695 tonnes before 2000, according to the municipal government's Department of Environment Protection (DEP). Recycling rates have soared from 2.4 per cent to 43 per cent.
The city's only landfill is now an ecological park, because it has been idle since the beginning of the year, DEP's chief secretary Lu Shih-chang said.
The three incineration plants now operate at below capacity because of less-than-expected trash. Some incinerated waste is even further recycled for use, such as cement production.
The days when communal rubbish bins lined Taipei's streets, and collected trash was dumped unceremoniously into the Keelung river, now seem unthinkable.
'Back then, we used to dump food scraps into the shared bins, which always smelled really gross,' said Ms Candice Lin, a 35-year-old resident.
In 1996, the municipal authorities removed the bins. Instead, garbage trucks were dispatched to collect trash directly from residents, much like it is being done today.
But residents needed to pay a fixed fee regardless of the amount of waste they produced. And recycling was an alien concept.
When the current system was implemented in 2000, many residents were unhappy about having to sort trash and buy 'authorised' garbage bags. Many used 'illegal' garbage bags instead.
The Taipei government, led by then mayor Ma Ying-jeou, deployed thousands of municipal employees as 'garbage inspectors' to ferret out errant residents.
The openings of street rubbish cans were even shrunk to deter residents from dumping household trash in them.
The authorities also took pains to educate the public about the benefits of the system.
Mayor Ma, for instance, carried a blue garbage bag with him and pulled it out at every photo opportunity.
It took Ms Lin's family about six months to come round to the new system, she said.
'Nowadays we take the trash out to the trucks every other day,' said Ms Lin. 'I don't think we have drastically reduced the amount of things we throw away but we definitely recycle more.'
For cost-conscious businesses, however, reducing waste was not an option.
Mr Chuang Kuo-ming, a supervisor at a small eatery, said he had done away with disposable chopsticks years ago because they are not 'squashable' and used up too many garbage bags.
The restaurant, which initially hired a private trash collector at NT$1,500 a month, now uses as few as a dozen 33-litre bags, costing only NT$178, a month.
Taipei residents on average pay only about one-third of what they used to for garbage disposal, at NT$51 a month last year compared to NT$144 a decade ago.
Their carbon footprint is also smaller. Per capita carbon dioxide emission was 4.2 tonnes in 2008, lower than the average of 4.6 tonnes among 22 major Asian cities surveyed by the Economist Intelligence Unit, an international research group, last year.
Officials from Hong Kong and mainland Chinese cities including Beijing, Shanghai, and Wuhan have visited Taipei to take notes.
Mr Lu, the municipal environment department official, said the government collects almost NT$400 million a year from selling the garbage bags, and up to NT$80 million from selling recyclables to recycling companies. Running the entire system costs NT$3.1 billion a year.
There is still more to be done, he said, such as developing better technology to boost recycling rates.
'We also need to keep educating the people,' he said, noting that each year, about 2,500 'garbage cheats' are caught using unauthorised bags or leaving their trash in public bins.
'The goal remains to reduce waste at source,' he said.
In 10 years, Taipei's unique system has halved waste produced
seokhwai@sph.com.sgLaunched on July1, 2000, Taipei's 'pay-as-you-throw' system compels households and businesses to put their waste in government-issued, blue garbage bags (above) sold for NT$1.35 to NT$45 each, depending on the size... Municipal and private garbage teams collect only trash contained in the blue bags. Residents who use unauthorised bags can be fined up to NT$6,000.
