Tiny (Eco) Footprints

According to 2006 statistics, the percentage of days in Taipei with “good air quality” was only 41.3%. It’s common to see people on scooters wearing SARS masks to avoid breathing the appalling traffic fumes. But Taiwan is an island 394 km in length, 144 km across its widest point, packed with 22.8 million people. This is a density of 635 people per square kilometer. For comparison, Canada has about 3.2 people per square kilometer. So of course this place will be a stink hole. The thing that really surprises me about the environment though is how eco-friendly the default lifestyle is here.

Homes
There really aren’t many houses in urban areas. I was in Taipei for three months before I happened to take a bus into a rich part of town where I saw about 30 houses. Everyone lives in an apartment. Most rented apartments come furnished, often with a washing machine. Wet clothes are dried by the sun. Heat also comes from the sun, and lacking sun in the depths of winter, you are simply cold all the time. No central heating. All the light bulbs in my place are the energy efficient LED sort, and I suspect there aren’t any incandescent bulbs left in the Taipei area.

Recycling
Recycling is also made very convenient. My apartment building has sorting bins outdoors in a kind of courtyard. If you don’t sort everything properly, the ancient security guard who wears two pairs of glasses at a time will sort it for you. It’s pretty humiliating, so I have four bags taped up against my wall: one for drink containers, one for paper, one for plastic, and one for non-recyclable stuff. This was a big change for me because in Canada I couldn’t recycle anything without access to a car. I have never lived anywhere where taking out the recycling was as easy as taking out the garbage.
My school also makes recycling easy. The students have the option of dumping stuff into the recycling bin, the garbage bin, or the food scraps bin. Paper food boxes, drink containers and scrap paper go into the recycling bin, and staff use both sides of white paper before it’s recycled. About 492,000 tonnes of material from Taipei City were recycled in 2007. Schools in Taipei City recycled 6,469 tonnes of material in December 2007 alone. It makes you wonder why we have to test run blue box programs in Canada before they can even be considered being made widely available. Recycling is way too complicated back home. Why is that?

Transportation
Taipei City has a phenomenal public transit system. The MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) is extremely efficient, timely and convenient. It is a very popular way to get around. Besides the MRT, the buses are also quite efficient in their own way. Buses in Taipei will hold as many people as possible, and then 11 or 12 more. Nobody ever asks when the bus arrives, because the answer is always “in five minutes.” In fact, five minutes may be the longest I have ever waited for a bus. Even though public transit is very popular, and it’s a treat to be able to sit down, not everyone relies on it. Trains and buses stop running at midnight, so that’s a huge downside to the system.
At the end of 2006, the number of registered motor vehicles in the country totaled 20.31 million. That’s a lot, but 13.56 million were motorcycles/scooters and only 6.75 million were automobiles. Scooters here are often criticized for being high polluting, but there’s no way they pollute even half as much as a car. And scooters here do the same job as a car – I have seen families of four on a single scooter with toddlers and dogs riding in front of the driver’s feet. Maybe the efficient use of space goes too far sometimes, but on the whole, Taiwan makes many admirable green efforts.