Taiwan garbage woes

Corbett | June 15, 2003 12:18 AM

One of the biggest hassles living in Taiwan is throwing away your garbage. For the many years I lived in apartment buildings, we just paid an old guy called the "guan li ren", who sat around all day watching TV, a monthly service fee to do stuff like collect garbage from our hallway. We simply put it in a garbage can in the stairwell and he took care of it. That was the good old days.

I live in a house now, and am not on one of those cushy ex-pat packages which allow me to have a maid and a driver. My maid is me, who cleans up on the weekends, and my driver is me, who parks and washes my car. The trash situation is unbelievably irritating if you don't have someone home to take care of it.

The first irritation is that you have to use government issue light blue plastic bags. Apparently it's an effort to reduce the amount of trash or plastic bags, or both. Either way...it's an obvious graft scheme devised to make someone's brother-in-law outrageously rich. Ten bags cost about $13USD. So what we do is put our daily trash in those little pink and white striped plastic bags you get when you buy something (but now you have to pay for), and when there are enough of those to fill up a standard trash can, lined with a bigger standard issue black trash bag, we take those two trash sub-sets out and pop them into the blue government bags, and wait for the proper trash time. Ooooh...saving so much plastic.

The second irritation is the trash truck picks up garbage at 5:45pm up the hill on the main road (about 300 yards away) on Mondays - Saturdays. No big deal, a little exercize with a bag of trash is ok. But who the hell ever is able to get back home from work by 5:45? I get off work around 7:30, and am usually home around 8:30. So this means that trash piles up in our patio all week, waiting for Saturday. But like most people who've dealt with work issues all week, Saturday is a day to go out and do something with your spouse or friends. Who's going to make sure to be back home at 5:45, cutting the day in half just to toss your trash? So the trash piles up and piles up. And then it begins to rain for days at a time, getting everything soggy and gross. Which means tons of mosquitoes just waiting for you to open the door to let them in.

Our undumped trash period lasted nearly a month this time. I'm never able to get home by 5:45, all four Saturdays were booked with business and social activities, so we had a messy situation that was driving us crazy with the smell. I noticed one of the bags was leaking some brown sludge which I realized were decomposed leftovers from a three week old BBQ, and when I tried to clean it up, the entire mass began to squirm like some horror movie. I had to clean it up with a shovel and some bleach. That was pleasant.

My neighbor Juergen, hob nobs with the politicians, and told Mayor Ma that Taipei would never be world class until it solved these archaic garbage issues. I totally agree. I asked Juergen what he did with his own trash, and he told me he just tosses it into the back of his car and drives off somewhere far away and tosses it next to a bus stop. "Let them deal with it," he bemoans. "I've run out of creative solutions."

Category: Mr. Asia

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