Trash Night Adventure

Big excitement Tuesday night: I took out the trash!

I shouldn’t admit this, but this is one of those “first time ever” events. I’ve always managed to stay in places where somebody else was responsible for the trash. Not this time.

Taking out the trash starts with detailed trash separation and recycling. Here are the recycling bins in the break room at my office: paper cups and bowls, metal, plastic, ordinary trash, plastic bottles, aluminum foil packs.

I spent quite a bit of time decoding the sign on the paper cabinet. Turns out it says you need to put shredded paper in a bag. Probably could have lived without that information.

At home we not only have to separate our recycling, we also have to put our garbage in a regulation bag. The bag is how people pay for waste disposal; when you buy the bags, you’re charged the waste disposal fee. That creates an incentive to recycle everything possible to avoid paying more than you have to. The bags have a hologram to prevent counterfeiting.

Once your trash is sorted and your garbage properly stowed in the regulation blue bag, you have to take it to the truck.

The garbage parade trolls the streets of Taipei every evening, arriving at its scheduled stops precisely on time (5:40 and 9:20 in my neck of the woods). Like an ice cream truck, it announces its arrival with a little song (musician cousin Mary Hammann told me it’s Schubert’s “The Trout”). And you’d better get moving, because garbage parade waits for no one.

I went out way early because I wasn’t sure where the truck would stop, and I had accumulated a full bag of increasingly fragrant garbage and really couldn’t afford to miss it. I paced the sidewalks in the direction my landlady had indicated when I moved in, clutching my blue bag and obsessively checking the time on my phone, alerting like a pointer to anything that sounded like The Trout.

When I spotted a man coming out of a side street toting his own blue bag I actually jogged up to meet him and said, “I’m so glad to see you!” He gave me an odd look, but apparently decided I was nuts but not dangerous and suggested I fall in behind him. Just then The Trout starting blaring down the street.

Well, dear reader, I needn’t have worried. By the time the Trout made it to the rendezvous point there were people dragging bags of garbage and recyclables pouring out of everywhere. There was no way I could have missed that flotilla of bright yellow, stinking-to-high-heaven, Trout blaring garbage trucks surrounded by a mob of blue bag toting citizens.