Taiwan’s public awareness towards the environment: Plastic
[Edited] Dec 15 2020 by: Jodie Ka Ho
Historical aspect
Over the past two decades, alongside other nations around the world,
Taiwan, once known to the world as the “Garbage Island,” for overflowing landfills and mountains of trash littering the street, has quietly worked on reversing its environmental condition.[1]
The Taiwanese people have started to not only pay more attention but also take actions in response to environmental issues, and have even appeared on multiple international media as a world leader in recycling.[2]
According to Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao (蕭新煌), director of the institute of Sociology at Academia Sinica of Taiwan, Taiwanese environmental awareness is mainly driven not by genuine care for environmental sustainability but rather motivated by financial incentives. He then breaks the awareness development into three parts: environment pollution, ecological destruction, and climate change.[3]
1980s Environment pollution:
Since the 1960s, the world economy had continued to recover, and the global political atmosphere had also become relatively stable; the Kuomintang Administration at the time then adopted measures such as “replacing agriculture with industry” and “original equipment manufacturing” to boost the economy. In the 1980s, when the economy had substantially improved, people finally started becoming concerned with the pollution created by industrial development in the past years, and more so how it has directly affected their daily life, including air and water pollution.
1990s Ecological destruction:
With the increased realization of the environmental problems coupled with improvement of literacy and lifting of Martial law, the level of awareness escalated further. The public, with the push from conservation advocates, started to understand the importance of ecological conservation; not only of the concern of how pollution can affect humans but also nature’s creatures, who have no abilities to defend themselves.
2000s Climate change:
At the turn of the century, new buzzwords such as ‘global warming’, ‘climate change’, and ‘carbon footprint’ were quickly being used in Western countries, and it wasn’t long until they began to spill into the lexis. Further raising people’s awareness of environment degradation. In addition, the extreme weathers, super rainstorms, record-high temperature, drought, wildfires, etc. also enhance the sense of direct threat to people, to a larger extent.
Policies changes
Even to this day committed environmental and conservationists are still fighting to reduce the damages caused by human activity. From pressure from the public, the current Tsai Administration has made some efforts into the transition from an economy-oriented to environment-oriented nation, but this has not been without its struggles. Some examples include prohibiting dine-in customers from using single-use utensils and single-use plastic straws, or consumers having to pay a fee for a plastic carrier bag at check-out, instead of giving them out for free, just to name a few. The intention being to shape a new consumption pattern to reduce wastes.
Fortunately, most Taiwanese people are more than willing to comply with the policies and contribute to the environment; according to the Taiwanese Environmental Protection Administration. More than half of the surveyed population have agreed to even expand the current regulations to a larger and stricter extent in the foreseeable future.[4] Although Taiwan was an early adopter of nation-wide bans[5] to try and reduce plastic consumption, the policies were admittedly slow and few considering the weight of the environmental issues plastics cause.
HUEMON conclusion:
We at HUEMON think that it is important for everyone to come together and offer their part in this crucial move; many a little makes a mickle. Take the plastic bag policy for instance, an individual might say “I am just one person” and a business, just one company but cumulatively it has been approximated that 4.5 billion bags per year since 2002 has been saved. We are proud to be a part of this wider movement will continue to follow this ideal through the means we specialize in, the process of product design.
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1. Taiwan Today. 1996. What A Waste. [online] Available at: <https://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=14%20percent2C29%20percent2C34%20percent2C45&post=23846> [Accessed 17 December 2020].
2. Chandran, R., 2019. Southeast Asia Looks To Taiwan As Recycling Pioneer. [online] Reuters. Available at: <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southeast-asia-environment-lawmaking-idUSKCN1TL21W> [Accessed 17 December 2020].
3. BuzzOrange. 2019. 「隨手關燈很可以，能源稅再說」一一 9 圖表分析台灣人環保意識的「過半假象」| Buzzorange. [online] Available at: <https://buzzorange.com/2019/09/19/how-taiwanese-view-environmental-protection/> [Accessed 17 December 2020].
4. Lin, C., 2018. Policy Cut 1.5Bn Plastic Bags This Year: EPA. [online] Taipeitimes.com. Available at: <https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2018/12/23/2003706648> [Accessed 17 December 2020].
5. Masterson, V., 2020. As Canada Bans Bags And More, This Is What’S Happening With Single-Use Plastics Today. [online] World Economic Forum. Available at: <https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/canada-bans-single-use-plastics/> [Accessed 17 December 2020].
