Garbage trucks in Taipei are now equipped with two containers, one for uncooked and the other for cooked kitchen waste. The uncooked garbage is sold to fertilizer plants, and the cooked to pig farms. The municipal government brings in an income of roughly RMB 2 million by collecting such waste, and reinvests the money in its garbage segregation and treatment projects, according to Gao Weiyu, an engineer from the Taipei Environmental Protection Bureau.

Taipei is also a success story in finding new lives for old furniture. If residents have unwanted pieces, they just call the environmental protection bureau who arranges for door-to-door collection. Their repair team fixes up the old pieces, publishes a list of items and their reserve prices on the Internet, and brings them to a designated second-hand market. Auctions of old furniture are conducted routinely once a week. Compared with new furniture, the prices of these repaired old pieces are at least 10 times cheaper, so they attract a lot of buyers. Gao Weiyu still keeps an old wardrobe that she bought at the auction, and is pleased to add that what money the auctions take in goes to related environmental protection funds.

Though the total amount of garbage has been reduced through such measures, Gao admitted that none of the efforts in her four years of working with the bureau has helped reduce excessive packaging. Taiwan has promulgated regulations to restrict excessive packing and stipulated penalties for violators. To reduce such waste at source, it also encourages residents to avoid using one-offs and rejects commodities with wrapping worth as much as the contents. However, these efforts have not yet yielded expected results.

The Taipei Pavilion itself is a model of resource reutilization. Converted from an old workshop belonging to a thermal power plant, it is staffed by people who are extremely scrupulous about using paper cups and one-off dishes. All this is relevant to the pavilion’s theme of total recycling and sustainability. “As an environmental protection worker, I think it’s important to learn to cherish what you’ve got. When you put unwanted stuff to a new use, you’ll feel as if you’ve dug up some treasure,” says Gao Weiyu. Because of its effective garbage reduction, what was to be Taipei’s third landfill has been removed from the municipal construction plan, and its second landfill will no longer be needed by the end of this year. The city’s goal of “zero landfill” will soon be realized. “We hope that all landfills will be retired from use, rather than rely on segregated trash cans,” commented Gu Zhikang, an official from the Taipei Environmental Protection Bureau.