Switzerland uses the principle of "the polluter pays". It is now illegal for cities to charge flat rates for garbage, because simple economics shows us that con

Switzerland uses the principle of "the polluter pays". It is now illegal for cities to charge flat rates for garbage, because simple economics shows us that consumption of things that are unmetered is much higher than things which are metered. In this case, the "consumption" being metered is in fact "production of trash", otherwise known as "consumption of the space in the landfill/incinerator". In my commune, a 35l sack costs 2 CHF. This is probably the real reason for the blue government trash bags in Taipei: they are probably using the same trash metering policy Switzerland uses. At the moment the official sacks were introduced, I did some back of the envelope calculations and found that the reduction in our combination "electric and flat garbage tax" bill as it turned into a simple "electric" bill paid for about 2 sacks a week. With paper, PET, glass and compost recycling, we could easily consume less than 2 bags a week as a family of 4. But without recycling, it would easily be 4 bags! The garbage authorities noticed a huge increase in recycling with the introduction of the official sacks. When the official government sacks were introduced here, there was some grumbling that "if these fancy sacks cost so much per bag, you'd expect that they at least never break!" Too bad that the economic concept of externalities is not widely enough understood. Families with children (or disabled people) in diapers unavoidably produce more trash than their neighbours. In order to not penalise them, they receive a few rolls of free trash bags per year.