99% Invisible - 213- Separation Anxiety

Episode Date: May 18, 2016

“Für Elise” is one of the world’s most widely-recognized pieces of music. The Beethoven melody has been played by pianists the world over, and its near-universal recognition has been used to attract customers for companies as big as McDonald’s  and as small as your … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. If you can recognize any piece of classical music, I bet it's this one. This is Fure Elise, written by Ludwig Van Beethoven in 1810. Maybe it reminds you of piano lessons you took when you were a kid. In my town, it was also the song the ice cream truck used to play. That's producer Avery Trufflement. In my town, it was also the song the ice cream truck used to play. That's producer Avery Troubleman. But if you live in Taiwan, and you hear a truck rumbling down the street playing Fear

Elise, it doesn't mean it's time to buy a popsicle. It means it's time to take out your trash, because this is what a garbage truck in Taiwan sounds like. This garbage truck song isn't just supposed to be cute and fun, although it is also supposed to be cute and fun. The singing garbage trucks are all a part of a completely different way of thinking about waste disposal, completely different that is from the way that we think about it in the United States. In the late 1990s Taiwan recycled only 5% of its waste.

Today Taiwan recycles well over half. The country is now among the world's top recyclers. And what changed in this period has a lot to do with the way that the trash is collected. OK, fur Elise isn't the only song the trucks play. In Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, the trucks also play this song. That's Amadens Prayer, my Polish composer, Tecla Batuzuska, Baronolska. And in Taipei City, the garbage trucks just

alternate between these two songs. The tech turns to play these two songs, two music, the in Taipei City. Even the elementary school kids can't sing the song. So we have brainwashed. This is Dr. Jasmine Wan, and she grew up in Taipei. Since I was a child, I knew that every time when the garbage truck comes, we were here, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Now the singing garbage trucks are such a part of life, it's hard to imagine a time before

them, but that time actually wasn't too long ago. We used to have a lot of big dumpsters, so there were a lot of rats, mosquitoes and things like that, and it's not good for our health. Just a couple of decades ago, Taipei residents threw their trash into massive smelly dumpsters on the streets. Garbage would end up in piles on the sidewalk and in parks, it would fester in the heat.

It was just nasty. Then Taiwan's democratization accelerated in the mid-1980s and created this desire to tidy up. Being a modern country means being a clean country. And when you have foreign visitors coming and visiting your capital, they shouldn't think, oh, this place is dirty. This is Mary Alice Hadad,

chair of East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University. In Taiwan, the pro-democracy movement got fully entangled with the environmental movement. and so as all those things moved together in the late 80s, early 90s, then the pro-democracy and pro-environment agendas got onto the public consciousness. Also, the environmental movement had a practical end. Taiwan was running out of space to actually put piles of trash because it's a small island and extremely populous small island. There's not that much space where you're going to stick all your junk, whereas in the

United States there has been historically a sense of the untamed, untabbed, endless wilderness. And you could just throw your junk into the wilderness and it would go away and you wouldn't have to worry about anymore. Not true in Taipei. It's a big city but it's really clean and the subways are clean and the stores are clean and the sidewalks are clean and it's really pleasant to be there. You never know that the city used to have piles of garbage littering the streets. Taipei and a number of other Taiwanese cities reduced the amount of trash by changing the way the trash got collected. This is my friend, Erin Newport. She lives in Taipei, where the garbage truck comes five nights a week, evenings, like

after work. In Erin's neighborhood trucks come twice in the evening, at five and at seven. I don't know if you take out the trash like once a week on one of the days. And Aaron's neighborhood trucks come twice in the evening at 5 and at 7. Aaron has to gather her own garbage and recycling and bring it out to a designated street corner and wait for the big yellow truck to come, with an ear perked for the sound of furilies or a maidens prayer coming down the block. Basically, this is a binless system or a garbage canless system. Your trash goes right from your house to the truck, ideally without ever touching the street.

You just have to bring out your garbage in a special bag. I pay my garbage bill by purchasing these blue Typhoon City garbage bags. These official blue garbage bags say city of Taipei on them, and each is emblazoned with a stamp. I buy them from the convenience store across the street. The official blue garbage bags come in a number of different sizes ranging from three leaders to 120 leaders, so the more garbage you throw away, the more it'll cost you.

And although Taipei residents have to pay for their garbage by the bag, recycling and compost are free. You don't need to buy bags for them at all. You can just take out your recycling in non-official plastic bags, and you can generate as much compost and recycling as you'd like. So, residents are incentivized to recycle more and throw out less. I watched Erin sort out all of her recyclables into perfect categories. These are the cans, cans and bottles.

So we have a few tea bottles. So when Taipei every yellow garbage truck is followed by a small white recycling truck, which is basically a cart full of different bins. There's a bin for plastic bottles, one for glass bottles, different metals and cans, papers and cardboard, and a compost bucket for raw food waste, and a compost bucket for cooked food waste.

Taipei residents have to sort their recycling into all these different categories themselves. Although in the white recycling trucks there are officials and volunteers who can help instruct you about which item goes where. So Erin, her housemates and I got all of her bags of trash and different kinds of recycling sorted out. And then we walked about a block down the street to wait with the rest of her neighbors who were all clutching official blue garbage bags.

I'm sorry to a lot of people gathered here today. And say this is maybe larger than your average crew. Then the moment we were waiting for. Yeah! Yes! There was this mad dash of people swarming to the school bus yellow garbage truck and the white recycling truck. Okay, this one, yeah, people are tossing it in. Swithly tossing their separate recyclables

and the bins, tossing their blue bags and the garbage truck and running away. It was madness, like extremely well organized madness. That was so chaotic. In this system for all its chaos has been working. Taipei City used to produce 3,296 tons of trash a day. Today, the city produces about 1,000 tons a day. That is, according to Chen Wichu, one of 65 officials who supervised the garbage trucks and their routes.

I met him at a garbage pickup site where Jasmine Wong acted as interpreter. Every week this is Mr. Chen. Hi. And he's super riser. Yes, we all had him. In his district, Chen oversees 20 garbage truck routes. And all those trucks have to make sure that citizens are sorting properly.

If they find garbage in the recycling bag, the people here will tell them that you cannot do that one more time, otherwise you will get ticket. And how much is the ticket? 200 US dollars. But that's the maximum. And you might think this is such a drag. There must be some people who buck the system by tossing their trash into public trash cans. Well, there are hardly any public trash cans in Taipei.

They're only in train stations or at bus stops. And those are little, they come up just below your knees. So in Taipei, for the most part, if you eat a candy or buy a coffee, you just take your empty coffee cup or your candy wrapper, put it in your pocket and bring it home. It's your trash that you put in your blue bag and bring out to the truck yourself. It's hard to imagine a system like this working here in the US. Every city here has a different method of trash pickup. But across the board, the uniting factor is that our American trash pickup system strive

to be invisible. The trucks make great efforts to come when we're working, or sleeping, or trying to sleep, keeping out of the way of traffic and not disturbing the flow of the city. We take our trash and recycling out to bins or down a shoot or to a dumpster, and it's gone. We don't have to think about it. According to the EPA, Americans recycle and compost about 34% of their trash, which is less than most rich countries. But some American cities do a lot better. San Francisco has probably the most forward recycling program in North America.

This is Robert Reed. He's the representative of Recology, the company that takes care of San Francisco's waste recycling and compost. Unlike Taipei, which has a public trash pickup system, many waste pickup services in the US are private companies, and we are the customers. That's how it works with Recology, which means they've got to keep their customers happy. Our number one focus is to provide superior customer service. And our next focus is to do as much recycling as possible and to make recycling easy and convenient for customers. Recology has set up similar incentives to the system in Taipei, where trash

pickup is way more expensive than recycling or compost pickup. For example, in San Francisco, recycling and compost cost about $2 a month per bin. Trash is about $26 a month per bin. But above all, ecology system is meant to be simple and stress-free. It has to be if you want people to keep paying for your service. People have a lot of demands in their lives, we understand that. You know, recycling might not be the very first thing. They got to make their boss happy, they got to pay their mortgage. Garbage and recycling and composting might not always be at the top of the list. We understand that.

Basically instead of putting the onus on the citizens to separate the different kinds of compost and recycling for themselves, Recology does the brunt of the work, sorting the different kinds of compost and recycling for themselves. Recology does the brunt of the work, sorting, so we don't have to. San Francisco, like a lot of other American cities that collect recycling, uses one catch all recycling bin. So you throw your cans, your bottles, your cardboard, all in the same place. And then all those different materials end up in a facility like recycle central. So this is recycle central, this is the large recycling plant on Pier 96,

where we sort all the materials from the blue bin, the bottles, the cans, the paper. We're going to go inside now. The facility is massive and it's where ecology processes most of San Francisco's recycling. You can see this great big pile of recycling. This is from this morning, this is from one day and we're going to get this sorted out because we got another big pile coming in tomorrow so we do 600 tons a day here. That 600 ton pile will wind its way up a huge surreal web of conveyor belts, where some of the 173 people on staff will separate the recyclables into 16 categories of materials,

with the help of some modern recycling equipment. So we've got magnets and we have fish ladders that separate bottles and cans from paper. They're on an angle and they temporarily suspend gravity. To make sure everything gets precisely sorted, there's some real state-of-the-art technology, like this apparatus that separates clear plastic from color plastic with optic sensors. Right here, the scanner is looking at the materials as they come by and when it sees a clear plastic, like a clear plastic water bottle, it hits it with a puff of air and you can hear

it. It's expensive, it costs $3 million for this machine and it came from the Netherlands. So this system, with all its worrying twirling conveyors and magnets and machinery and 173 employees, it's dazzling and it makes less trash by doing more recycling. And recycling creates 10 times more jobs than landfilling or incineration. Of course, it also takes all the direct sorting out of the hands of the people who actually create the waste and charges them for the service instead. As a result, recycling in the US can be expensive.

I guess that's part of the problem, like to the extent that there's pushback in recycling, which I've seen some of in the United States now, it's often about the cost of it, and that's very costly. And that's true if you're using the single-stream processes function, and it's less true if the household does the separating. That's Professor Mary Alice Hadadagin. true if you're using the single-stream processes function and it's less true if the household does the separating. That's Professor Mary Alice Hadad again. If your community wants to recycle, all that stuff needs to be separated and sorted, somehow.

Whether you use a $3 million machine from the Netherlands or compel an entire sweet potato-shaped island of people to stand on the corner at night. The Taipei system is cheap and efficient because the city has conscripted their citizens as workers, and it's been successful. Taipei is a great example of a big, major global metropolitan area that did not have a good garbage collection system not that long ago and they have completely transformed and it could be an example for us all. Which is not to say we should necessarily copy Taipei's system.

What's worked for them might not work for the US. But consider the American garbage truck creeping around at dawn or during work hours, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, trying to keep trash out of sight and out of mind. You don't really pay attention to it, but everyone should pay a lot of attention. If we had to watch our garbage pile up in our homes without taking it out to the bin and had to set aside time in our days to catch the garbage and recycling trucks coming down the street. I bet we'd produce less junk. But I also think if I had to hear this song twice a night five days a week, I would murder everybody. 99% Invisible was produced as weak by Avery Troubleman, with Katie Mingle, Sam Green

Span, Delaney Hall, Kurt Coles, Dead, Sheree, Views, Seth, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Helen Sang, Erin Newport, Ethan Young, Sam Langton, and Jasmine Wong. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced under the offices of Arxine, in architecture and interiors firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook. You can follow us all on Twitter and Instagram. We have a very good Tumblr that Avery takes care of, but the best way to explore the 99%

invisible activity that shapes the design of our world is to do a deep dive on our website. It's 99pi.org. The valuable activity that shapes the design of our world is to do a deep dive on our website. It's 99pi.org. Radio TIPI from P-R-X.