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Most young, single, and/or wealthy people don't personally deliver their trash to the truck. The apartment complex I'm living in now in Taipei has trash and rec
by maxkwallace 8y ago
Most young, single, and/or wealthy people don't personally deliver their trash to the truck. The apartment complex I'm living in now in Taipei has trash and recycling bins down the hall on my floor. The last one I lived in had compost too, with separate bins for meat and non-meat food waste. It's still mandatory to use the municipal blue trash bags.
Depending on the vendor, you do occasionally see trash piled up in big round bags that sit on the ground outside restaurants or stalls. Some are much better about limiting disposable plates and utensils than others.
Obviously the lack of space on this small island plays a role but more broadly, I think there is a sort of diffuse sense of social capital, and as Eugene says, civic cooperation, that allows public spaces and institutions to function differently than in the USA.
- JackFr 8y agoI would imagine this has to be. I was trying to imagine how this would work in my apartment building in Manhattan. The building is 15 floors, 10 units per floor and two elevators, which are neither particularly fast or large. It seems like it would be completely unfeasible for everyone to try to deliver their trash to the street at the same time. Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding the process.
- maxkwallace 8y agoNo, I think your assessment is correct. Few residential buildings in Taipei are that tall (my current one, for instance, has 6 floors) but the households that personally deliver their trash to the trucks tend to be individual units (not part of a apartment complex or gated community) in older and more residential parts of the city in buildings with fewer (e.g. 3) floors. But the bigger factor is that people who have the money to live in newer apartments would prefer to pay for managed trash.
- Arn_Thor 8y agoIn Hong Kong (not Taiwan) most apartment buildings (certainly tall ones) handle waste disposal. There's a trash can in the back stairway on each floor, into which each floor's residents dispose of waste. Granted, there's no mandatory recycling here (one day, we can only hope!) but I imagine it would work the same way, just with more bins. Sometime during the day people hired by building management bring the trash down and dispose of it in containers or recycling centers.
- maxkwallace 8y agoWhen I was walking around recently, I also ran into a self-service trash disposal/compactor installed on the street called iTrash (cute video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA-clGCo5YI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA-clGCo5YI). For trash, you pay by weight, and for recycling, you receive a small amount of money in return. This would be the high tech solution; it seems like they're piloting it at one location only. Whether these would save money or not if deployed en masse is an operations research problem, but the more interesting question is whether citizens would wax nostalgic if their musical garbage trucks started to disappear, and if that would influence folks' sense of civic duty.