As I've mentioned before there are so many restaurants and beverage shops here and people very often take-out. Of course, this results in tremendous amounts of garbage and honestly I don't know how the Taiwanese government solves this problem. If, in average, a person take-away once per day it'll be one paper cup, one paper box and a plastic bag times the number of inhabitants in Taiwan which is about 23000000 paper cups/plastic cups and equally many paperboxes for only one day. Simple maths gives 8,395,000,000 plastic cups (8,4 billion) a year. What a waste! Another problem is that there are few public garbage tins. Far from all items are recycled so I can imagine that the take-outs are a very big expense for the society and the environment.
I've seen some people use thermobottles when they buy coffee in cafés and use their own chopsticks (instead of single-time-use bamboo sticks, mostly because of hygience reasons) but it's rare. There are signs that encourage people to "save the environment" and "please recycle", to what extent do they help? In my opinion, the problem can only decrease by less use of throwaway items.
Illustration of my calculations.
To throw home garbage is quite different from (at least where I live now). We have buy blue plastic bags from 7-eleven to put the garbage in. Every night (except at Wednesdays and Sundays) at 10.30 pm the garbage car comes and it plays a squeaky melody to notify its arrival (just like "Hemglassbilen"). So by this time people come from every direction with blue bags and queue to throw away garbage. Really nice gathering.
The garbage truck with high-pitched melody. (I have to confess that it was embarrasing when I picked out my camera to snap a picture. People must think that I'm insane that find the garbage truck so interesting.)
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