Taiwan's efforts from "linear economy" to "recycling economy"
Do you remember that in the early days in Taiwan, the landfills were filled with garbage?
Do you remember the people’s protests against the construction of new landfills decades ago?
In fact, these memories of the past were all due to the environmental problems brought by the “Linear Economy”, because in the era of lacking environmental protection concept at that time, people only have one choice which was to damp things that was used or damaged. However, in the past 20 years, Taiwan has implemented the “Recycling Economy” in our lives. From the waste sorting, the available resources can be effectively recycled. The household garbage was collected with the garbage cleaning fee to make the household waste output effectively reduced. The push for the reduction of plastic bags in 2002 and the ban on plastic straws in 2019, are all efforts by Taiwan on environmental issues. Now, we have been promoted to a country with high resource recycling rate, and even ranked second only behind Germany in the world. In actual terms, the amount of garbage produced by Taiwanese people was 1.14 kilograms per day, but now it has fallen to 0.4 kilograms, and landfills account for less than 2% of total waste. It is also worth mentioning that the industrial waste recycling rate has reached 80%. This is enough to show that the awareness of environmental protection and recycling economy has been deeply rooted in our life.
But do you think this is enough? Is our environment really getting better?
The cruel truth is that we learned from the "Rethinking the future of plastics" report in 2016 put forward by the Ellen Macarthur Foundation, which promotes the Circular Economy. Taking plastics for example shows that of the world's plastic products only 14% came from recycled plastics; and where did the remaining 86% of plastic waste go? According to the report, 14% of plastic waste was disposed of in the form of incineration for energy. 40% of plastic waste was disposed of in a buried manner, and even 32% of plastic waste was continuously distributed in the environment. These different proportions of plastic waste are burned or weathered into small plastic particles scattered in the air, soil, groundwater and the sea. It is conceivable that the creatures born in this environment are bound to be polluted, and human beings are the ultimate predators in the earth's food chain. Many creatures eventually become the food on our table. These harmful substances eventually all entered our bodies. "The best way to reduce environmental impact is not to recycle more, but to produce less." So the real question is not how much waste we recycle, but how to repair, reduce or reuse these resource. Therefore, the concept of Circular Economy began to spread rapidly around the world.
