Wednesday, 5 September 2007

At the supermarket part one


One think I like about the street market near my place is I don't see stuff like this, a single apple on a polystyrene tray. The Taiwanese love packaging, so much of it wasteful and unnessesary. A packet of biscuits might have each biscuit individually wrapped, a packet of lollies almost certainly would. Eggs individually wrapped in plastic. About three years ago the government passed a law banning the use of plastic bags at restaraunts and food stands. Everybody ignored the law and the government had no way to effectively enforce it, so they repealed the law! To be fair they are making efforts, supermarkets charge for plastic bags at the checkout, things are improving, but they still have a very long ay to go. Eating out is common, and daily produces mountains of paper trays, plastic cups, disposable chopsticks, and plastic bags. There is so much rubbish that rubbish trucks drive up almost every street every day, somtimes twice a day, playing music that to a westerner would likely mean that the ice cream van was here!

2 comments:

Captain Oddsocks said...

Has recycling caught on, or does it all end up in landfill?

Hello Xu Xu said...

Here in Taipei the recycling situation is pretty good, a recycling truck follows right behind most of the rubbish trucks, and the garbos will give you a hard time if you are throwing good recyclables in with regular rubbish.