Six Years in Taiwan Taught Me: Convenience Always Wins

I've always wanted to write this blog article but never seemed to find the time to sit down and do it. On a 1.5-hour bus ride to my friend's home in Yilan County, with nothing much to do, I decided to use my iPad productively. There was a lady sitting a few rows in front of me eating bread from plastic packaging, and I thought this bus ride might be the perfect time to finally work on this piece.

Passengers enjoying a packet of snacks on the bus during my journey from Taipei to Yilan.

It's been more than six years since I started living in Taiwan, an island country in East Asia. My initial intention in coming to this country was to obtain a master's degree in environmental studies. I wanted to learn how Taiwanese people manage their waste. As a Malaysian, I knew that, due to limited financial resources for improving infrastructure in urban and rural areas, waste management has always been a problem in my country.

After my first year of obtaining my Master's degree, I learnt a lot about waste management—from Taiwan's system and how Malaysia's waste management system works—but most importantly, it made me unable to unsee the problem here. So here I would like to share the insights I've had after staying in Taiwan for six years.

The Zero Waste Movement Is Surprisingly Not Active in Taiwan

When I started my zero-waste learning journey in 2018 back in Kuala Lumpur, there was a grassroots movement in Malaysia. NPOs, NGOs, and local communities worked together to develop local solutions such as composting stations, recycling stations, and upcycling workshops. So, when I moved to Taiwan, I was looking forward to learning new zero-waste solutions from local organisations. However, the zero-waste movement is pretty much dead, even in the cities.

I noticed that there was a Facebook group for people interested in a zero-waste lifestyle, and there are multiple books about zero-waste living (even in Chinese, written by Taiwanese authors). In the group, people organise group purchases of grains such as beans and rice. There are also a few zero-waste shops in major cities. But, especially after COVID, business hasn't been going well, and more and more zero-waste shops have closed down. I did have an opportunity to visit one before it closed for good. To be honest, the prices weren't cheap, as the goods are either organic or imported. In my opinion, pricing is one of the factors that prevents people from shopping at a place where they need to prepare their own containers at home, bring them to the store, fill the containers themselves, weigh them, pay, bring them home, use them up, wash the empty containers again, and repeat, which brings me to my second insight.

Convenience Comes First

Taiwan is a country that runs on efficiency. Food doesn't have to taste good if it can fill your stomach and get you ready to return to work after a five-minute food break. I noticed this a lot during my Master's programme and even more during my time working in Taipei. A secondary school student goes to the nearby convenience store to grab a refrigerated bento (boxed in paper material coated with plastic film to prevent leakage), heats it up, and eats at the store quickly before heading to their tuition centre. A delivery man buys a takeaway lunch bento and finishes his lunch in his delivery van before moving on to the rest of the day's deliveries. Schools organise meetings during lunchtime for professors and buy paper lunch boxes for them so they can eat and meet at the same time. An office lady, exhausted from work all day on a rainy day, buys hot soup noodles from a noodle stall on her way home, and the vendor packs her boiling hot soup in a paper bowl. A grandmother goes to the morning market with her little cart and brings home multiple plastic bags of groceries.

Receiving single-use bento is a norm when you attend events in Taiwan. This picture was taken during a Malaysian gathering event that I attended. I brought my own reusable utensils, whereas others used the single-use utensils the company provided.

I've witnessed all these scenarios. No matter the age, gender, profession, or income level, people's daily lives are full of schedules and events—they're always rushing here and there. But they never stop to think about what these actions could do to their bodies and to the environment. They never stop to think about where those bento boxes go after they throw them into rubbish bins. It's always convenience first. They're so fond of convenience that you can see 2–3 convenience stores on one street everywhere in Taiwan. A lifestyle that favours convenience is part of their culture, and because of this lifestyle, Taiwan is currently facing multiple obvious consequences, such as overflowing garbage disposal sites and old incinerators struggling to keep up with burning the country's trash. Of course, incineration and landfill are not the only approaches Taiwan is trying in their waste management efforts. I will share more insights on the recycling and circular economy approaches in the next article.

This photo was taken near Ningxia Night Market, Taipei City. The waste management crew handle the waste disposed of by locals and tourists. (I wonder how many times the crew come in one night.)