On any given night in Taiwan, if you hear a song that sounds like an ice cream truck song blasting through the streets, you can expect people to come out to the streets with their hands full of garbage bags. In order to properly separate recycling and trash, a different truck playing Beethoven's "Fur Elise" comes around to take people's recycling. In many countries, including the U.S., people leave their trash on the street to be collected or dispose of it in a public dumpster. In Taiwan, every person has to personally hand their garbage over to the garbage truck workers as the truck comes by their home. If you miss the truck driving by your house, you have to wait until the next day it comes around.
I learned about how Taiwan manages waste and recycling.
Since Taiwan is a small island nation, keeping the trash off the streets and away from the coastline is a big concern. It is very easy for trash to make its way into the ocean and potentially harm the marine ecosystems. The Taiwanese government developed this method of trash collection so that garbage would never actually be left out in the open at all, but rather go straight from a person's home to the garbage truck.
