
What I Learned from a Taipei Alley - NaOH
http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2018/5/11/taipei-alley
======
peterburkimsher
My other comment was a little too negative, so here's two positive
alternatives.

The American system of throwing lots of great things into unlocked dumpsters
does wonders for the poor. It's much more effective than non-profits, who
might only help citizens/legal residents/etc. When I was broke in California,
I ate food from dumpsters for about 6 months.

The French recycling system has large bottle banks placed in each village,
where plastic, glass, and paper can be deposited. The council also issues free
compost bins to houses that have gardens, so they can dispose of organic waste
and make their own fertiliser.

Other items (wood, electronics, furniture) take more effort. In France these
can be taken to a "déchetterie", or scrapyard. That would be great, except
that it's recently become a _crime_ to remove items from these. That's
actively hostile to the right to repair. In America it was often free to fish
for scrap, and in Taiwan & Korea I'd just have to pay a small fee based on
weight. Most of the computers and bicycles I owned came from scrapyards.

Can anyone else offer insight from other countries?

~~~
hnzix
In my country we used to have bi-annual hard rubbish days where people would
leave out old unwanted furniture to be collected by local council. When I had
little money and no car, I could walk around the neighbourhood and drag home
slightly damaged furniture, fix it up and furnish my home.

Now they've moved to just-in-time collection vouchers, so this perfectly
serviceable furniture goes straight into landfill, and poor people don't get
the chance to repurpose it.

On the positive side, the council pays a small reward for collecting and
returning recyclable bottles, which provides the homeless with a chance of a
modest legal income and stops some of them from panhandling.

~~~
jeanchen
This effectively happens once every year near American universities. Lots of
furnishings in good condition, left in haste by students.

------
rlue
I love Taiwan, but I would argue that it's the garbage system that builds a
sense of civic cooperation, not the other way around. My impression of
Taiwanese culture in general (compared to LA, where I grew up) is one of
commitment to the status quo, preference for the path of least resistance, and
strong risk aversion.

All of these add up to mean that if the truck is how you're supposed to take
your trash out, most people will accept it as the unavoidable hassle that it
is. The remainder will either live in a fancy apartment that takes care of it
for you, or else litter and/or abuse the few streetside trash cans you can
manage to find around here.

That's not to discredit the people in Taiwan who really do give a damn –
there's a great video on YouTube by a vlogger who invites the mayor of Taipei
(!) to walk the streets picking up cigarette butts and other litter with him,
and they share some great insights with each other. But I see Taiwan's trash
disposal system much more as a triumph of central planning than the Taiwanese
character.

EDIT: forgot the link to the video (no translation from Chinese, though)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtTQO4OsZqU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtTQO4OsZqU)

~~~
ddeck
_> who invites the mayor of Taipei (!) to walk the streets picking up
cigarette butts_

One consequence of the lack public trash cans is that every smoker I've seen
disposes of their cigarette butts by throwing them down the steel-grated
drains that line every street.

In several years, I've never seen anyone cautioned or fined, despite sometimes
doing this in front of police and traffic wardens.

Given the copious rainfall, I can only assume that the butts find their way to
the rivers surrounding the city and onward to the ocean. Presumably this could
be prevented with a little education and enforcement, but there appears to be
little concern.

------
bdon
I like this topic a lot.

Part of the reason this works is because households in Taiwan are much more
likely to be multi-generational - there's usually someone home in the evening
to take the trash out at the scheduled time. In higher end apartment or condo
complexes with more people living alone, there may be a maintenance fee to use
a dumpster.

Taking out the trash is also a vaguely social activity (at least among the
elderly people in my area) you inevitably run into your neighbors all at the
same time in a way that's very uncommon in the US sans for perhaps block
parties.

~~~
peterburkimsher
I counter that it doesn't work for a lot of other people, particularly the
young and single. Pickup times are during working hours or social hours. There
are seriously people who excused themselves from social functions because
their rubbish is collected at 7:30 pm.

Recycling is only collected twice a week. Oh, you want to study Chinese?
Sorry, the class is the same time as your rubbish collection. Or you've got to
be home on Saturday. There is nowhere available to take rubbish and just leave
it there.

It causes arguments between housemates. When my girlfriend complained "Why did
you put the used bendon box/bubble tea cup/etc in the regular rubbish?" and I
suggested that it was my housemate, it started a terrible argument. When she
caught my CouchSurfing guests not using soap to wash the oil out of a tin of
tuna, she wouldn't talk to me for 3 days and refused to let me have guests
again.

If you want to throw away broken glass, and put the pieces inside a cereal box
for safety, the rubbish collectors will yell at you for throwing it in non-
recycling. The only real solution is to throw everything into the regular
truck, run away fast, and never admit it to your girlfriend.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
Not going to be popular here but this sort of behavior is a form of abuse. You
must conform to an externally defined standard of virtue, or face consequences
...

~~~
rangibaby
> You must conform to an externally defined standard of virtue, or face
> consequences ...

That is basically every East Asian culture in a nutshell:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_\(sociological_concept\))

Related:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honne_and_tatemae](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honne_and_tatemae)

------
maxkwallace
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
I 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
No, 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.

------
sand500
>A much more vibrant and livable San Francisco likely involves something like
25-50% fewer cars, sidewalks 50% wider, buildings 50% taller, twice the
population density, and 25X the number of electric scooters, just to throw out
some back of the envelope guesses of enough magnitude to alter one's
conception of the city in a significant way. But no incrementalist approach
will get the city there.

I totally agree. We need to break out of the cycle of designing cities for
cars and then not building up public transit because everyone has cars.
Another thing important for a vibrant city is an abundance of street level
retail.

~~~
pmontra
I agree with most of that but why should buildings be taller and population
density higher? I'd like the opposite: taller buildings == less visible sky,
more people around == more noise and more long lines. The three things I
didn't like of China when I was there on vacation and I was happy not to find
back home.

~~~
sand500
I think just having more people makes the area more lively. Less people will
basically turn it into suburbs. Also higher density means public
transportation can be better utilized and reduce the need for cars. I saw this
at Arlington and Nova where right around the metro stations, there were high-
rises and the area was very walkable and lively.

------
m0llusk
This article is unreasonable. Taipei has alleys and clever ways of dealing
with garbage therefore San Francisco should allow larger number of scooters.

But this ignores the major conflict that has already flared up. Without
specific places allocated these scooters end up taking up valuable space in
the public domain. Without successfully establishing methods for controlling
and enforcing where scooters go they end up everywhere. My work involves
wheeling equipment around along sidewalks all over the City and I am
frequently blocked by not just individual scooters but entire piles which are
heavy and difficult to move in part for the same reason they end up
distributed that way. There is no particular place for them and only very
limited efforts to collect them and bring order.

If you want to revolutionize some aspect of cities such as transport or trash
collection then you have to do it in a way that does not block other people
from doing their work and attending their duties. If your revolution starts to
cause a lot of damage as the scooter craze already has then it will start to
be reigned in by official actions. Thinking that you have absolute infinite
license to block streets and pile up scooters in a very small and congested
city is unreasonable and wrong and has already failed.

Try again maybe? Maybe aggressive collection of scooters based on Taipei trash
collection could work where current methods have failed?

I understand that you want scooters and that would be nice, but I want to be
able to use the sidewalks and have already established a pattern of use that
leaves them available to the vast majority of others who live, work, or visit
the City.

~~~
maxkwallace
This article is contrasting SF's incrementalism with the holistic top-down
overhaul of the trash collection system in Taipei. It's not saying Taipei's
alleys imply SF should allow more scooters.

You have a legitimate grievance, but you are mischaracterizing what the
article is about. It's not about scooters. It's an argument that
incrementalism will only help you find the nearest local maximum, and that
sometimes achieving a breakthrough in building a vibrant city requires
centralized holistic policy changes.

------
pingec
A Taiwanese explained to me that since they have to pay for the official trash
bags they care about how much stuff they can fit into that bag.
Consequentially they compact the trash, take out whatever can be recycled and
in general spend some time dealing/thinking about trash. This makes the
problem of trash more personal to them so they actively think about it and
care more about how much trash is produced. I have seen many Taiwanese carry
around a non-disposable set of chopsticks, a glass bottle for water that they
fill up at various places and some even have a glass straw.

Also the garbage trucks don't seem to always stop, it was funny to me watching
people coming from all directions and running after the truck and throwing the
bags in :-).

~~~
somberi
Same in Switzerland. It works like this - you can only submit trash for
collection in authorized bags. Authorized bags can be purchased only in select
shops. These bags are expensive and the larger the bag exponentially pricey
they are.

Incentive to compact as much as you can in relatively smaller bags, and
financial incentives are aligned.

In the countries I have lived, Switzerland was where I had to constantly
conscious of trash accumulation and disposal.

------
dionian
> City officials discovered that citizens had been skirting recycling mandates
> by dumping things in public trash bins

This is certainly true, i often saw signage on trash cans in places like 7-11
saying the trash was for customers only. And when I asked a local where I
could toss a wrapper, they just took it and put it in their pocket or
something.

------
pstuart
This reminded me somewhat of an impressive aspect of Burning Man: no trash
cans and no loose garbage anywhere.

------
moltar
I have footage of these garbage trucks:

[https://youtu.be/BtpWn6PuDX0](https://youtu.be/BtpWn6PuDX0)

~~~
cloudkj
After our last trip to Taiwan we decided to make a mobile game about the
garbage trucks, just for fun. You run through a quintessential Taiwanese night
market past street food stands, motorcycles, and 7-11's while dodging debris
like durian and bubble tea in order to catch the garbage truck.

Here's a quick trailer if anyone wants to check it out:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SXWybqiLjQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SXWybqiLjQ)

------
dzhiurgis
We used to have collection trucks in Lithuania few years after Soviet Union
broke down. They used this horrible siren around 7pm once a week or so.

No notion of recycling. But there wasn't that much plastic in use until
somewhere around year 1997 or so. I think it switch to public container system
around that time too.

------
Pamar
Can anyone explain how it works in Japan? I visited twice and I noticed that
public garbage cans are basically non-existant. I kept my trash in a plastic
bag and dropped it in the wastebasket at the hotel.

~~~
Pamar
Accidentally found out myself (I am just back from a short vacation in Tokyo):
one of the guides explained that almost all garbage cans were removed as a
consequence of the Sarin attack in the Tokyo Subway in 1995 - see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack).

------
eastendguy
This article has a very interesting take on the subject. And for those that
have not seen it live, here is a video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHAJ7f0HyjM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHAJ7f0HyjM)

As background info: Before this system was introduced, people would simply
leave their smelly garbage bags on the street for collection, not a good idea
in a hot and windy country.

I was not aware that it also helped to reduce the amount of garbage
significantly (as the article describes). That is a very cool side effect - or
was this planned?

~~~
bdon
Not mentioned in the article is that the official blue garbage bags need to be
purchased. Garbage collection is effectively pay-by-volume.

They're cheap, but the fact that they're not free changes people's behavior
towards using less bags and separating compost and recyclables.

------
rmason
Growing up in Detroit in the late fifties and early sixties we had rag men
that would come down the alleys. They blew some sort of whistle and would
collect rags, newspapers, cardboard and such. They would have a single horse
pulling a wagon.

[https://www.detroityes.com/mb/showthread.php?20679-sheeny-
ma...](https://www.detroityes.com/mb/showthread.php?20679-sheeny-
man-\(1950-s-junk-dealer-with-horse-drawn-wagon\))

~~~
mc32
In Taiwan they have people on scooters who will haul "trailers" of cardboard
for recycling. So it's still a thing. AFAICT, they're not supposed to as it's
supposed to be taken by the recycling company but often times either people
hand it to them directly or they will retrieve from dumpsters (which take
cardboard).

