Litter

[Super Hans]

Sure, little old ladies can carry on doing what they did 30 years ago, making a few pennies cleaning it up ... but it that progress?

Those little old ladies you speak of were a lot younger 30 years ago, and may have even had all their teeth.
But yes, I agree. Not manufacturing the useless nonsense that inevitably turns into rubbish is the key. Less packaging - it's only marketing boffins who think that things such as SD cards should come in a box the size of one of those vegetable trays you find at the bottom of your fridge. I understand the packaging here serves also as an anti theft device, but even so....

[jdsmith]

so, you want people to feel bad when they litter, and not necessarily stop littering.

Pillock

What do you think?! Of course I want the littering to stop. Do you litter JD? Huh? do you?

Daily. On this site.

[Steviebike]

To all those, who believe I should pick it up.

While I'm happy to pick up a bit of litter here and there and at times I do, and also give it back to the person who just dropped it. I often go cycling and on my journeys I see enough litter to fill up a truck, so shall I get a truck and go pick it up? What about the money everyone pays tax for, surely a little of that is allocated for refuse clearance? Sure my street is clean and the one next to it too. But not along the Koaping river it isn't (the ditch that runs next to the road, I get a good view of it on my bicycle). This is just one of many. I wish I had the belief that the rubbish was old too. They recently finished building a new bridge on Highway 17, within a few weeks of it being finished there was substantial amounts of litter on it.

The packaging problem is true but, a lot of packaging can be recycled if the person who brought it could be bothered, and it certainly can end up in a bin as opposed to being left where it was finished.

The campaigns to stop littering? They're not working very well in Kaohsiung maybe they're better in the north, that I wouldn't know. One of the great things is the army of people picking up litter but, it's not exactly right or enough and neither is the excuse not to install public bins. I get the feeling that people think that someone will always pick up the litter? But for me those numbers don't add up. I don't think there really is an excuse or a reasonable explanation to why there is litter. It is an individual act multiplied. You can't say [however wrong it is] that because there is so much packaging that a person is left so frustrated they have no other option but to throw it on the floor? Everyone knows it's not OK to throw litter, surely?

I balance this against other problems in the world but, each problem has its own merits/negatives and this one could be fixed with time and effort. When I was growing up in Cornwall during the 70's and 80's the attitude was very similar and it took a lot of education and campaigning to make it better. It ranged from fly-tipping to petty littering, but by the the 1990's the problem was reduced to acceptable levels. I'm sure the story is the same for many places and I don't see Taiwan as being any different. It has a duty to keep it's island clean and should do it seriously.

[headhonchoII]

Ireland used to have a terrible litter problem too. Fly tipping , plastic bag covered 'forests' along back lanes surrounding the city, rusty cars and refrigerators in fields, junk food wrappers everywhere. Most of the issues have been dealt with except for the litter on the city streets. It takes a long time. Although the Irish were one of the worst offenders litter wise in Europe we were also the first to introduce a plastic bag tax, perhaps in the whole world!
So things can improve and people can change behaviour. What I mean to say is don't get discouraged, things will get better. Also what litter is collected here is fairly efficiently recycled.

Taiwan tried the plastic bag tax and while it worked for a while the contractors and plastic manufacturing industry here were too powerful along with the average customer mind set being more focused on convenience than anything else. I guess they managed to lobby the government to keep the tax low enough so that it is ineffectual. I mean Taiwanese drink hot drinks and soups from plastic cups and even worse plastic bags! WTF?

[cjc444]

Taiwan tried the plastic bag tax and while it worked for a while the contractors and plastic manufacturing industry here were too powerful along with the average customer mind set being more focused on convenience than anything else. I guess they managed to lobby the government to keep the tax low enough so that it is ineffectual. I mean Taiwanese drink hot drinks and soups from plastic cups and even worse plastic bags! WTF?

.

Yeah, don't forget that small company FPG (should stand for Formosa Plastics Group, but it doesn't). They just happen to be if not the richest company, one of them, in Taiwan and even Asia.

[Taiwan Luthiers]

I went to Berlin thinking that Germans are all clean and stuff, except when winter comes and all the plants are leafless there are a crapload of packages, dog shit, and other junk in the bushes. Its actually worse in more densely populated districts. I actually thought Taipei was cleaner, or at least had less dog shit

[tsukinodeynatsu]

My SO's a litterer. For some reason he thought it was OK to throw things out of the window while I'm driving.

I stop the car and make him pick it up.... He doesn't do it (much) anymore.

I'll also tell kids off when I see them littering. Usually they look at you with the goldfish expression and pick it up.

But I really, really HATE littering. There's just no point to it!

[tsukinodeynatsu]

sorry, double post.

[NonTocareLeTete]

I'm fed-up with letter. Everywhere I go there is litter.

Sounds like the Taiwanese have more in common with Americans than we first suspected!

What part of America have you been to? I'm from California and have never seen litter even approaching what we have here. I've asked my students "Who's visited America?" and then I ask "Did you see any litter on the beach?" and to a person they've all shook their heads no.
I live on the beach here and it's abhorrent. People just leave their shit all over the place. Who raised these people? Why do they think that's okay?
Like ecaps I pick up a bag of litter when I walk my dogs but it barely makes a dent. I can fill the bag in the last 6 yards of my walk. I only do it so I can soothe myself. The trash collectors think I'm crazy because I have more recycling than anyone else. One of my neighbors asked me if I'm turning the shit in for recycling. The same neighbor, I might add, who hands her grandchildren plastic garbage and instructs them to throw it on the beach.
It's repugnant and something needs to be done.
However, I am the first to admit that the same thing would be happening in America if public trash cans weren't conveniently placed at nearly all public places. I've been through the "People dump all their personal trash" convo and it just goes to show how f'ed up the trash system is here. I have a friend who works in the local government and I asked her why they don't put out public trash cans at beautiful places like the rivers where we go to bbq (by the way I drove THAT group of friends crazy picking up every bit of litter in the place. They were nice about it, but I'm sure there was a lot of mental eye-rolling at the ridiculous foreigner). Anyways, she says that they don't put out public trash cans anymore because they'd just fill up. A mountain of garbage, she said, so we took them away. Well yeah. You've got to empty them too.
Litter situation won't change until the garbage system changes.

[finley]

Anyways, she says that they don't put out public trash cans anymore because they'd just fill up.

No! Goodness me. Inconsiderate bloody public, putting their trash in the public trash cans. Some people are just insufferable.

I sincerely hope your friend isn't representative of the kind of quality policymaking that goes on at higher echelons of government.