| Reduce Plastic Waste, Pollution | ||||||||||||||
| By Ye Zi-hao Translated by Tang Yau-yang Photos by Yan Lin-zhao | ||||||||||||||
On average, each person in Taiwan uses two plastic bags a day. Most of the used bags end up as garbage. They cause pollution, harm the environment, and have a negative impact on human health. “Reduce, reuse, and recycle” may provide a way to slow the rampant growth of plastic bags and the deterioration of the Earth. Next time, stop to think for a second before you use or throw away a plastic bag.
In some places in Taiwan, such as Taipei and New Taipei City, garbage trucks pick up trash only if it is contained in special-issue plastic bags. The cost of such bags, much higher than ordinary ones, is like a usage fee: The more you use, the more you pay. Like the pay-as-you-earn tax system, it is a pay-as-you-discard for garbage disposal. This policy helps curb the volume of garbage that people throw away. People think twice before carelessly tossing something in the trash, and they are therefore more inclined to reuse and recycle stuff. One day in a modern convenience store in Taipei, a cashier deftly checked out a customer’s items and stuffed them into a plastic bag. Everything appeared quite ordinary, but there was a slight difference this time: the plastic grocery bag itself. This bag is what city officials call a two-use eco bag. It could be first used as a shopping bag, and then reused to hold garbage for disposal. No ordinary plastic bag can be used as a garbage bag. If the two-use bag is indeed used as a garbage bag, then that saves the use of one more plastic bag. The introduction of the eco bag can thus be expected to help cut down on the consumption of plastic bags.
Durable but detrimental What is the big deal about these bags? Why should anyone even care? You should, if you care about the environment. In Taiwan alone, 18 billion plastic bags are used each year, for a population of only 23 million people. Just imagine the magnitude of the problem on a global scale! This is definitely a source of pollution to be reckoned with.
Inexpensive, convenient, light, nonporous, and versatile, plastic bags have easily and overwhelmingly replaced bags made with more earth-friendly materials, such as paper. Their ascent to dominance has been swift. In Taiwan, 40,000 metric tons of bags were made in 1976. By 1981, in just five short years, that number had skyrocketed to 120,000 metric tons. Though plastic is very durable, a desirable trait when the product is being used, it is in fact not good for the environment. The plastic is not biodegradable, it releases toxins, and sometimes it even kills. Such bags are widely used not only in Taiwan but seemingly everywhere else as well. Chen Yang-wen (陳楊文), executive director of CarbonZeroToo, once showed a colleague photos that he had taken of plastic bags drifting on the ocean. Upon seeing the pictures, the colleague asked, “Are these new species of jellyfish?” Chen gave another example of the omnipresence of plastic bags: “One day when I was in Inner Mongolia, China, working on anti-desertification, I drove for nearly an hour and saw white plastic bags all along the road.” The bags are in the oceans and on land. They can be found in people’s homes, garbage cans, sewers, waterways, underground, and, when burned, up in the air. The harm these plastics can do is manifold. Incinerating plastic bags inappropriately may release toxic chemicals, such as dioxin, into the air. The plastics react to oils, acids, and high temperatures, resulting in the discharge of substances harmful to humans and other organisms. If such reactions occur in soil where bags are buried, the released hazardous substances can continue to hurt or haunt the animals and plants in the vicinity for years to come. If they looked like jellyfish to Chen’s colleague, no wonder marine animals mistake them for food. Uncountable marine animals have died from ingesting plastic bags. In June 1984, a typhoon caused severe flooding in northern Taiwan. After the floodwaters had receded, the culprit was discovered: drain pipes clogged by plastic bags. The bags have caused problems not only in water but also in fire. One month after that flood, the Neihu landfill in Taipei caught fire. Many buried bags were burned, releasing untold amounts of dioxin into the air. Floods and fires such as these may be unavoidable sometimes, but the prevalence of plastic bags has exacerbated the damage. To reduce the damage that can be done by plastic bags, the Environmental Protection Administration in Taiwan instituted a policy in July 2002 to limit their use; it stipulated that supermarkets and convenience stores could no longer give their customers plastic bags free of charge. In May 2006, it even initiated the recycling of plastic bags in Taiwan, a first in the world. The government’s measures have managed to lower annual usage from 20 billion plastic bags to 18 billion. However, of those still used, only seven percent are recycled. The rest go right to landfills or incinerators.
Doing something about it Plastic bags cause problems wherever they end up: remaining stubbornly in the ground, killing marine organisms, clogging up drainage pipes, or releasing dioxin into the air if burned. They have become an environmental nightmare. However, there is a way to lessen their impact: recycling them so they never make it to landfills, sewers, streams, or oceans.
At the Yingren Recycling Station in Taipei, Tzu Chi volunteer Huang Zhou A-rou (黃周阿柔) and a few others work to recycle plastic bags. All are getting on in years, but that doesn’t slow them down. They process the bags so that each one is completely free of undesirable foreign matter, such as adhesive, price labels, and ink. They take the time and energy to do this to get the best recycling price for the bags. The recycling station is only about a mile from Wufenpu, an area with lots of wholesale clothing shops. It is also close to a traditional market. The station therefore receives a lot of polypropylene (PP) bags used to contain clothes, and lots of polyethylene (PE) packaging materials for fruit.
Lin Shao-qing (林少卿), another volunteer at the recycling station, indicated that many people in Taiwan collect recyclables, such as cardboard boxes or plastic bottles, but they tend to shun plastic bags. This is because they require extraordinary efforts to thoroughly sort and clean—the sort of painstaking and cost-ineffective tasks that Huang Zhou, Lin, and other volunteers like them have undertaken. “Since other people don’t bother to recycle plastic bags, we decided to take on the work,” said Lin. These volunteers do what others do not want to do because, unlike others, they do it not for money but for the love of the Earth. They want to help keep our world clean. The amount of work and the cost ineffectiveness that have dissuaded others from recycling plastic bags do not matter to the Tzu Chi volunteers. However, the area in which the Yingren Recycling Station is located uses so many plastic bags that the small station cannot possibly handle them all. This is why volunteers from the Sanchong Recycling Station in New Taipei City became involved. Chen Jin-zhu (陳金珠) is a volunteer at this station. Through her dealings for her children’s clothing business, she learned of the many available used plastic garment bags at Wufenpu. These bags were clean and free of grease, making them ideal for recycling. The Sanchong station was more spacious and had more volunteers than Yingren, so she organized volunteers in Sanchong and neighboring Luzhou to give the Yingren station a hand. They’ve been doing this since the end of April 2012. Five days a week, volunteers from Sanchong and Luzhou set out at nightfall and travel to five collection points in Wufenpu to collect the bags. A big, waist-high bag full of plastic bags weighs less than it appears. Still, volunteers have to hurl many such bags from the ground up onto the bed of the truck, many times an evening, evening after evening. Behind their tireless labor is a desire to do something for the Earth. “Oops, it fell off again,” volunteer Lin Tian-ding (林添丁) said. He picked up a bulging bag that had fallen off the truck and threw it back onto the towering load. Painstaking sorting The full truck hauls plastic bags back to the Sanchong Recycling Station. Chen Jin-zhu then assigns volunteers to handle the incoming materials. Because plastic bottles, metal cans, and plastic string are sometimes mixed in with the bags, Chen asks volunteers who don’t know how to sort plastic bags to roughly divide things into groups. Other people finish sorting the bags. The sorted items are given to still others to finish the processing. Chen tries to make sure that everyone, regardless of their age, gender, or physical condition, gets to do what they do best at the recycling station. The group that finishes the processing is mostly made up of elderly volunteers. They remove foreign items from the bags, such as price stickers and sealing adhesives. This is a significant step in elevating the plastic bags to the highest grade possible, so that the dealers who purchase the bags can more easily recycle them, for which they are willing to pay higher prices—as much as over ten Taiwanese dollars a kilogram (15 American cents per pound). As a reference, mixed bags that don’t receive such fine preparation fetch only about two dollars a kilogram. At first, most shopkeepers did not sort their garbage into groups for easy recycling. They were either too busy to bother or unaware of the benefits of doing so. Consequently, it was common practice that they would throw all their garbage, whether recyclable or not, into a single receptacle. This increased the workload of Tzu Chi recycling volunteers.
In response, the volunteers implored the shopkeepers to do the basic sorting. Once aware of the benefits of sorting, storeowners have been willing partners in the recycling effort. Even scavengers have pitched in to help; they do basic sorting of plastic bags before giving them to Tzu Chi volunteers. “We showed them the correct way of sorting over and over again, and after we did that enough times, our message got across,” said volunteer Qiu Mei-zhen (邱美珍). The abundance of plastic recyclables has resulted in one full load after another on the trucks dispatched by the Sanchong Recycling Station. The dedicated work of Tzu Chi volunteers has resulted in less pollution in the world and more funds for the Tzu Chi Foundation to carry out its missions. Yet, the volumes of recyclables that volunteers handle regularly have also reminded them of the importance of reducing the use of resources. They encourage people to lead an eco-friendly life, and they rein in their own consumption of resources in their daily lives. The sequence of the environmental “three R’s”—reduce, reuse, recycle—is significant: The earlier a practice appears in the sequence, the more effective it is in helping to conserve the environment. Volunteer Lin Shao-qing, for example, takes reusable bags along with her on her shopping trips, so she does not need to get any plastic bags from the vendors. If she forgets to bring her own bags and has to get them from the stores, she cleans them after she gets home and gives them back to the vendors to reuse. Other volunteers do the same. The Jing Si Books and Café on Songlong Road in Taipei is a recipient of such used bags, which it uses at its checkout counter. There was once a bumper sticker that said, “If you don’t throw away garbage, I don’t have to pick it up.” Likewise, if you and I reduce and reuse, we can have a cleaner and better world for ourselves and future generations. Remember that even a small impact on the environment is still an impact. Don’t look down on any small action you can take that can benefit the Earth.
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