Not Everyone Is Recycling...

Recently I attended a health promotion event where people were encouraged to take long walks. The reward for completing the course? A bottle of mineral water. As you can see, not everyone recycled the bottle after drinking the water...

Organic Batteries And Eco-Movies

Yilan County is holding its fifth annual Green International Film Festival. The festival's website names some of the movies and documentaries being shown this year, such as Half Life: A Journey to Chenobyl and Texas Gold. In previous years the festival has included the works of Japanese director Tsuchimoto Noriaki.

According to this report, alongside the festival there is an exhibition of organic agricultural produce and eco-friendly products such as organic radical batteries (ORBs) and energy-saving electrical appliances. ORBs could be a very good thing for Taiwan; the battery-recycling rate here has improved but remains dismal, despite incentive programs.

Coconut-Fiber Brushes

My wife has been buying these at the local morning market. They're for washing dishes. They're billed as eco-friendly because you don't need to use any detergent - something in the coconut fiber is said to remove oil and grease from pots and dishes. They seem to work well. Also, when you're done with the brush, you can dispose of it naturally - every part can decompose, except for a tiny piece of wire, and the plastic bag it comes in.

Scientists have been experimenting with biodegradable plastic bags made partly of coconut fiber. Also, here in South Taiwan, coconut fiber mats have been used on slopelands to hold soil in place until plants and trees have taken root; this was done along the banks of the Love River.

I'm curious: Was the coconut fiber imported or grown here in Taiwan? How efficiently are the coconut palms used? According to some sources, nearly all parts of the coconut palm are useful.

Millions Have Gone Missing

According to this article in the China Post, about seven million cell phones were sold in Taiwan last year, but the Environmental Protection Administration managed to collect only 2.34 million old phones between April 2006 and February 2008. I'm sure millions of old phones are sitting in people's homes. I'm sure plenty were tossed in with regular trash and incinerated or dumped in landfills. How many were unofficially recycled? Don't tell me there are no unlicensed breakers operating in the backstreets, especially now the price of gold is so high...

The article is about recycling. No mention is made of refurbishing old phones for reuse by low-income families in Taiwan or people in other countries.

Cell-phone recycling has been mandatory in Taiwan for two years, but enforcement seems to be non-existent. People should be compelled to pay a deposit whenever they get a new handset - NT$1,000 at least - which they'd get back only when they hand the phone in for recycling or refurbishing.

Recycling Clothes

Dozens of these boxes have appeared throughout the township in which I live. People are being encouraged to put unwanted clothes inside. I don't know if the clothes are then sorted and given to the needy, or if the fabric is recycled.

I'm passionate about recycling, but I don't plan on getting rid of any of my old garments this way. In our house, anything that's no longer fit to wear becomes a floor rag. This cuts down on "trash miles" (the distance garbage is trucked before being burned or dumped in a landfill), and reduces the number of tissue papers we get through.

Recycling Bricks

Here's something I saw the other day in Tainan City: A wall being built using recycled old bricks to provide bulk, and cut down on the amount of concrete needed. It's nothing new, but it's better than the empty oil cans which have been used in some buildings in Taiwan (including some which fell down in the 9-21 Earthquake).

I wonder if the bricks came from the original wall on this site, or were trucked in a significant distance?

Just as some people are trying to cut down their food miles, others now care about construction-material miles. However, the building that has been acclaimed as Taiwan's greenest, Beitou Library in Taipei City, is made largely of wood imported from North America. Also, it lacks racks where cyclists can lock up their bikes.

Homemade Pesticide

Cigarettes are good at killing people, so it's no surprise they're also good at killing pests. My wife has begun collecting cigarette butts to make pesticide for her garden. She soaks them in water for several days (see photo), then adds more water to the solution before spraying.

It's a technique one of her cousins, who smokes, told her about.

The pesticide itself may be no better for the environment than commercially-produced stuff, but at least it doesn't come in a plastic container, no energy was consumed in its making, and it hasn't been trucked hundreds of kilometers from factory to customer.