Awaiting A Name

comparisons

When I first came to Taiwan, I was appalled at how much unnecessary packaging there is. If you buy a tea, they’ll give it to you in a paper cup with a sealed plastic cover, which is then put in a plastic bag, with a straw wrapped in it’s own individual packaging. Fried rice comes in a paper box held closed with an elastic band, accompanied with both a plastic spoon and wooden chopsticks (sealed in their own plastic, of course).

People eat take away food a lot in Taiwan. This makes for a lot of rubbish. Even if you say ‘Leave the chopsticks’, there’s still the matter of the individual plastic bags that everything gets put into, no matter if it’s already in a box or paper bag. And then I realised the plastic bags are to enable you to hang them from the handlebars of your bike or scooter. Things started to make sense as I took up the same lifestyle of eating at food stalls and hole-in-the-wall restaurants. I’ve now accumulated a lot of uselessly-sized plastic bags and I barely take notice when I get yet another one. They just get put in my recycling pile and taken out when it’s garbage day.

Other than not eating take away food, I can’t really think of an alternative. Would it be possible to persuade everyone to carry around their own reusable plastic bags and utensils with them? I doubt it. Apparently, Taiwan issues fines for the use of plastic bags and utensils, although night markets are exempt due to concerns over maintaining sanitary conditions [both these articles are several years old - I was unable to find anything more up-to-date].

In some ways, Asia has shown me ingenious methods for reusing and recycling: magazine pages folded into origami tabletop trashcans for throwing away the bones of your meal; banana leaves used to cook, carry and eat from instead of plates; plastic bottles cut and made into outdoor socket covers to protect from rain. On an individual scale it’s really quite amazing and something we should think more about in the West. In other ways I feel like Asia is lagging behind. Here’s a summary of the UK and Taiwan (from an interesting website for comparing how ‘livable’ different countries are):

I’m quite surprised about the electricity, but then again Asia’s full of flashing neon shop signs. Perhaps that’s part of the higher consumption?

While we’re at it, here’s South Korea compared to the UK:

As a postcript, here‘s a short film from the BBC about garbage disposal in Taiwan. Where I live, the garbage truck comes 3 nights a week, but I’m always working late so the only chance I get is to take it out is on saturday nights. Not very fun. It does stop everyday for about 10 minutes in the morning enabling people to catch it on the way to work, but with my schedule I’m not going to be getting up for that either.

I guess I’ll just have to stop with all the take aways and only eat out instead.