The strange rituals of Taiwan’s bin men

The bin system in Taiwan is strange. There is no single bin day. A citizen retains responsibility for their rubbish until the moment the bin lorry arrives on their road, at which point they must take it upon themselves to put it into the appropriate receptacle or shredder. In my bit of Taipei, where my university sent me for a year to study Mandarin, the lorries came almost every evening. Each neighbourhood had two slots – mine were at 18.30 and 21.20. Before the lorries left, they would play loud warning jingles. Sometimes this was Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’, and sometimes it was ‘A Maiden’s Prayer’, a Polish piano piece also heard on Taipei city buses.  

Recyclable waste could be thrown away in any sort of bag. For non-recyclable waste, you had to go to one of the Japanese-style convenience stores that sit on every corner and ask conspiratorially at the counter for lese dai, as if you were buying vodka or explosives. The special blue bags, which come with a holographic stamp of authenticity, sell for around 18p each. This surcharge funds waste collection, which is not factored into the government budget.  

Like many of my friends, I lived in a ramshackle apartment with a dangerous kitchen. I paid about £300 a month to live at the eastern edge of Taipei in a flat made of corrugated metal. My home sat precariously on top of a building that was already five stories high. Its construction, it turned out, had been illegal. The small kitchen lacked ventilation and fireproofing, which meant I never cooked or even lit the stove. (My reluctance was vindicated when, towards the end of my year in the city, I saw a plume of smoke across the road and checked the local news to discover a house fire in an identical sixth-floor extension, with one fatality.) This fear of my dodgy kitchen meant I developed a dependence on cheap street food, so I was inundated with the nightly non-recyclable remains: polystyrene boxes, plastic bags, and single-use cups and straws.  

Unsurprisingly, given its rickety construction, the place had a terrible rat problem. One evening I looked up and saw something fall past my window. It sounded like a hailstone but was unmistakably a large rat, its furry stomach bouncing off the glass like a child on a slide. The rats and mice had found their way in through an opening a few inches from our front door. My Spanish flatmate attempted, unsuccessfully, to block their passage with a paperback copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude. I heard them running inside the ceiling at night and imagined them laughing at us. My landlady, who rented dozens of similar rooms to foreign students all over the city, blamed us for our rat-and-mouse issue. We were, apparently, not taking the bins out enough. I felt a little put-out. Despite my dubious supper habits, I was a diligent adherent to the litter laws.  

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Melanie McDonagh

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There are some public bins in Taipei – strewn across fast roads and inside metro stations – but fines apply to those caught using them for household waste. One enterprising classmate made midnight pilgrimages to one in the financial district, tipping her rubbish away with the gusto of someone dumping a corpse in a river. I perfected my sleight of hand so I could use the customer bins in my local convenience store to throw away packaging from a nearby dumpling chain. A friend looked in the recycling area at our language school and found empty bottles of olive oil, disposed of by fellow expats who were apparently put-together enough to cook proper meals in a foreign country, but not to organise waste collection in their own homes. 

One of my classmates learnt her local bin timetable through trial and error, waiting on the street to no avail for the lorry to come. There was a sense that the jingles, queues and holographic bags were not simply for sanitation. They formed part of an ancient tradition designed to preclude us from integrating into Taiwanese society.  

Another friend describes fits of nostalgia for Taiwan’s bin men, brought about upon replays of ‘A Maiden’s Prayer’. It’s worth noting that she shared the rent for a more expensive flat with her boyfriend – around £200 more per month than the rest of us paid – and that they had an in-house concierge to handle their rubbish. This is part of an unspoken class divide in Taiwan. Those who can afford it buy freedom from their rubbish. Everyone else must plan their evenings around it, ready to hit the streets when the bin men come calling. 

You’re supposed to learn new things on a year abroad. I thought I was learning a lesson in how quickly I could run down 15 flights of stairs to the opening strains of ‘Für Elise’. Now I find it was really a lesson in civic responsibility. I’m sure the locals where I lived in Taipei would have been shocked by the inadequacies of waste management in Britain, where there are repeated strikes, and where bin men fall prey to physical attacks. Bin men seem to have it better in Taiwan. There is a sense that they are authoritative aides in a task shared with us civilians, rather than quietly disdained workers. It may also help that they have their own special tune.  

The most important lesson: our landlady was wrong. The rats came not for the high turnover of takeaway detritus but to gnaw at the parcel tape that held our kitchen door frame to the wall. When I emailed her photos of the various holes in our apartment, she acquiesced and had someone come to fill them. I never saw another rat or mouse after that, apart from all the ones on the street.