Is Taiwan Already Zero Waste? Depends on How You Define It.

The streets of Taipei are devoid not only of litter, but of trash cans. This scene puzzles many foreign visitors to Taipei. How can you keep streets clean, they wonder, without any trash cans?

Through smart policies and engaged institutions, Taiwan has drastically reduced landfilling. But outside of a few articles, there is precious little discussion in media about Taiwan’s miraculous success—and no mention of the fact that Taiwan sends less than 1% of its waste to landfills.

It’s an impressive accomplishment. When other countries have achieved this threshold, it has resulted in dramatic, somewhat misleading headlines such as The Independent claiming that Sweden has “run out of rubbish.” If this is really the case, Taiwan should be screaming its own achievement from the rooftops—especially as Taiwan has the added benefit of actually recycling its waste into products.

Data Collection on Trash Collection

It’s actually not difficult to find statistics on Taiwan’s total waste diversion rate, or the amount of waste kept away from landfills and incinerators, in English. Simply go to the Taiwan Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) website, which has become much easier to navigate in English than when I first started researching. (Sadly, the same cannot be said for Taipei’s EPA website.)

Now, this is where the convenience ends. The data is all there, but unless you are preternaturally gifted at math, you need to copy each number into a spreadsheet in order to figure out Taiwan’s landfilling rate, which is the proportion of waste sent to the landfill over total waste generation.

Yes, that’s right—you can begin your viral listicles. Taiwan sends less than 1% of its waste to the landfill. By some standards, this achieves the criteria for “zero waste.”

Now, obviously, Taiwan is not repurposing, reusing, and recycling the other 99% of its waste.

Last year, Taiwan sent 42% of its waste to the incinerator, down from 56% in 2004. Waste incineration remains a controversial technology in some parts of the world. For Taiwan—other than a radical restructure of its population, economy, and capitalism itself—there was little the island could do.

Over time, you will notice an overall reduction in incineration rates. This is because of the reduction of garbage production in general. Another waste shrinker was household and industrial composting, which began in 2004 in Taipei.

However, recycling and—to an uncertain extent—waste bans remain the largest drivers of decreasing waste volume.

Over time, you can see Taiwan’s recycling rate jump. You might also notice that this differs from some other oft-quoted statistics. This is because I looked at the EPA’s conservative data for “4-3 Amount of Municipal Waste Recycled by Implementing Agencies.” I say “conservative” because anyone who handles their own garbage in Taipei knows that there is an informal networking of resource collectors waiting for your trash each night. Sometimes, these aggregators of our household waste bundle it up and sell to official brokers. Other times, it goes into a more informal network. The general feeling among other trash researchers is that Taiwan’s real recycling rate of municipal waste is somewhere between 50% and 60%. It’s hard to keep track of millions of tons of traditionally unwanted materials.

Wrapping Up

All countries mislead the public about waste. San Francisco famously claimed an 80% diversion rate from landfills, while many in Europe have thought their recycling actually ends up being recycled—this is often not the case. The truth behind what happens to our waste is complicated.

However, assuming Taiwan’s statistics are mostly correct, we can see a clear trend.

Sound waste policy reduces the total amount of trash entering landfills, increases recycling, and reduces overall garbage generation. Charging for municipal garbage disposal, establishing an extended producer responsibility scheme to create recycling funds, widespread education, and legal penalties really do work. Headlines constantly inform us of new waste reduction inventions and new ways of cleaning up ocean trash. We already have the solutions, and Taiwan is but one more example pointing toward successful waste management strategies.

Now, only the hard part remains: Setting up these policies in the areas that need them, and finding the political will and funding to do so.

To be clear, not every country should copy Taiwan. Instead, they should look at what Taiwan did well and find ways to adapt those principles into their respective contexts. There is no perfect solution to trash reduction tomorrow. Instead, we can set up the right policies that vastly reduce trash in less than a generation—something many of the world’s purported waste reduction leaders have not yet been able to do.

(Feature photo by Shih-chen Yang on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)