| Less Hurt on the Earth | ||||
| By Wu Yu-dui and Huang Xiao-qi Translated by Tang Yau-yang Photos by Huang Xiao-qi | ||||
She’s getting on in years and suffers pain from old injuries, but she doesn’t let that stop her. She visits stalls and shops every day to collect her “treasures.” As long as the market is open, she doesn’t let herself rest.
It is just four o’clock in the morning, but Guo Wu Lan-xiang (郭吳蘭香), 62, is already on Zhonghua Road in Xinzhuang, New Taipei City. She makes sure that she is there early so that the precious things are loaded onto her bike—not a garbage truck. She calls on fruit stalls and other shops in the marketplace to collect used plastic bags and packaging material, such as styrofoam. Fruit farmers typically wrap their fruit in cushioning material before placing it in large cardboard boxes for shipment. When the fruit eventually arrives at retail stores, the storekeepers remove the cushioning wrappers and put the fruit on display to be purchased. Before fruit makes its way into the hands of consumers, a lot of cardboard boxes, plastic bags, and cushioning material have already piled up on the premises of a fruit stall. The disposal of cardboard boxes is relatively easy because many people collect them as recyclables and take them off the hands of store owners. But the plastic bags and cushioning materials are a different story. Many people don’t know they are recyclable, and even if they do know, such things don’t fetch much money anyway. So storekeepers usually just toss the stuff in large plastic bags and throw it out with the rest of their garbage. Lan-xiang is out to prevent the last step from happening as much as she can. She makes her rounds in the marketplace and fumbles through large plastic bags looking for her treasures. It is not uncommon for rotten fruit to make its way into the bags, too. She simply ignores the foul smell of the rotting fruit as she works through the bag. She goes to the marketplace three times a day: in early morning, around midday, and at night. She does not take time off from that routine; if the market is open for business, so is she. She picks out the plastic bags and cushioning material, rain or shine, one store after another. She never stops. After doing this persistently for some time, she has won many storekeepers over to her efforts. Du Wen-jie (杜文傑) was the first of them all. He said that on windy days, plastic bags and fruit wrappers used to be blown all over the place; when it rained, people would easily slip on them. It was only later that he learned that those things could be recycled. Du expressed his admiration for Lan-xiang’s eco-friendly efforts. He said that she shows up at four in the morning when he receives a new shipment to replenish his inventory, and he sees her still in the marketplace at seven in the evening collecting her things. “I’m deeply impressed by her steadfastness,” the store owner marveled.
Packaging treasures Lan-xiang has volunteered for more than a decade at the Tzu Chi Zhonggang Recycling Station in Xinzhuang. In July 2011, she learned from volunteer Xu A-jiao (許阿嬌) that packaging material for transporting fruit was recyclable. That included things like plastic bags and foam cushions. She knew that those things littered the grounds of the marketplace near her home. They had always been swept up and disposed of like regular garbage, but when they end up in an incinerator, they can contribute to bad air pollution. Therefore she decided to pick out these items for recycling. She started to dig through the garbage in the marketplace for those materials and take them back to her recycling station. She’s been doing it ever since. “It feels great to be able to pick out treasures from mountains of garbage,” she said, “Doing this keeps me busy and makes my day go by quickly.” That also leaves her with little time to lament the physical pains that are with her always, pains from an old injury in her ankle and from spinal surgery. She has difficulty bending forward, a motion that is called for again and again in her routine of picking things up. The physical exertions often cause her to perspire profusely, especially in the muggy summer heat. Sweat pours off her forehead and cheeks, sometimes getting into her eyes or mouth, but still she does not stop. “Do you know that sweat has three distinct tastes?” she asked. “Salty, bitter, and bland.” Her dedication has touched a chord with many fruit vendors. They voluntarily pick out recyclables from their operations throughout the day and keep them in one location for Tzu Chi trucks to pick up after the market is closed. If shopkeepers do not help her out like this, Lan-xiang does her thing manually. She gathers her recyclables, loads them onto her bicycle, pedals to the recycling station to drop them off, and returns to go through the cycle again. Once she made nine trips between the marketplace and the recycling station in a single day. Such frequent trips have raised calluses on the inside of her thighs. Her energy has been passed not just to the stall operators but also to volunteer Chen Huang Mei-yu (陳黃美玉). Mei-yu uses her lunch break at work to collect plastic bags and cushioning material at another market and rushes them to a recycling station before returning to work. Lan-xiang says that to ensure that she does not miss the early start each day, she does not allow herself to go back to sleep when she wakes up at three o’clock. She works hard every day. Though her body aches, she does not take much rest—the pain gets worse when she sits around doing nothing. To rejuvenate herself, she goes to a park and uses a tree to help her stretch out a bit and to rub her aching back. When the day comes to an end and she lies down in her bed, she prays not for a good night’s sleep, but rather to be able to wake up in the morning in good enough health to work another day. She always tells herself: “To give is a blessing. If you don’t, it’s a waste of your life.” Early each morning, she goes out to work as usual—the moon and the stars seem to light her path. When the sun comes up, she feels that she has earned another day of precious time to do her good work. Her bicycle wheels keep on spinning down her path of treasure collection.
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