Thereafter, plastic largely replaced glass bottles. Every year the number of plastic bottles grows by more than 10%. According to estimates of the Union Chemical Laboratories of the Industrial Technology Research Institute, every year in the Taiwan area consumers throw away more than 260 million plastic bottles.

Although plastic bottles have become a daily necessity, bottles, like all plastic products, do not decompose. Given that ROC residents don't seem to be able to respect the rules not to throw garbage anywhere, plastic bottles have become one of the corps of "ten-thousand-year throwaways" everywhere in the living environment. They also block urban water drainage pipes, and are a factor in flooding.

Even if they can safely reach the garbage dump, because bottles are slippery, and are not easily flattened, they create "soft land" which is not safe. They also take up a lot of space, and with dump space increasingly hard to find, the bottle's special features turn into headaches. If one tries incineration, because the plastic includes chemicals and the bottles have more or less residual liquid, the bottles could damage the incinerator itself and create secondary pollution.

The traditional way of reclaiming and reusing old products has at present become the best way out of this dilemma.

In recent years, many advanced countries have begun a policy of recycling petrochemical products like plastic to reduce pollution and save petroleum. Many things widely used in a modern lifestyle cannot be reused, but because they have toxic contents (as, for example, dry batteries have mercury), it is necessary to recover, concentrate, and deal with them so as to reduce damage to the soil, water, and human health.

As the good traditional habit of reclaiming used things has withered with increasing prosperity, the Environmental Protection Administration of the Executive Yuan, in the "Methods for Waste Clean-up" set in November of last year, wrote up methods for handling waste product recycling and clean-up. It was projected to start this year that there would be public announcements for recycling of ten major polluters, including plastic bottles, automobile tires, tin cans, herbicide containers, light bulbs, and so on. Among these products, as early as three years ago, the then Bureau of Environmental Health began figuring out recycling methods for plastic bottles.

Jengwan Shih, a senior specialist at the EPA's Bureau of Solid Waste Control, says that plastic bottles can't be recycled like glass ones (which can maintain their original appearance and be returned to the market after high temperature disinfecting), but the technology for using reclaimed bottles to make other plastic products is already easily available abroad.

Currently abroad, plastic is separated out according to color, smashed, washed, and made into pellets. After processing it can be used in toys, sleeping bags, or blanket filling, or can be used to make wash basins, water containers, or other plastic products.

Because after being recovered, plastic can be turned into items with value, and technology is easy to acquire, this makes plastic bottles one of the recyclable products to which industry can adapt itself most quickly. This has caused bottles to be listed as the first product to be recycled in the EPA list relcased in June of this year.

Last May, more than ten major soft drink manufacturers came together and stipulated that for every bottle produced, a fixed sum would be paid into a reclamation fund. Currently they have already accumulated NT$160 million. This fund will be used to establish bottle recycling sta tions and buy used bottles and bottle crushing equipment. The stations will send the already packaged bottles to an environmental engineering company established by Far Eastern and the Pan-Asian Plastic Corporation, called the Taiwan Recycling Corporation.

Taiwan Recycling has imported remanu facturing technology from abroad. It will begin operation next April. It will take bottles and produce and sell recycled plastic products. After five years, if there is a surplus, five percent will be distributed among soft drink manufacturers.

Because lifestyles are prosperous, today even if there is a surcharge on bottled soft drinks, the rate of return will not be high. But if the fee is too high, manufacturers fear that bottles couldn't compete with other packaging. Further, the volume of consumption of bottles is enormous, but few stores in Taiwan--still mostly "mom and pop operations"--have space to store empties.

Until now, there has been reliance on "scavengers" to collect reusable goods from the garbage dumps. But garbage dumps are nasty places, and pose concerns about the health and safety of the scavengers. One dump has already decided to ban scavenging for fear the soft ground will collapse.

But reclaiming the bottles before they get to the dump "still relies on the consumer," says Allan Yeh, president of the Taiwan Recycling Corporation. Few households, schools, or eateries separate garbage, and throw plastic bottles in with the rest. Even if these can be recovered, the work is messy and difficult. Therefore, the soft drink union has chosen the Minsheng neigh-borhood, the Ta An public housing estate, and several middle schools as demonstration areas to set up bottle recycling containers. The results so far have been pretty good.

The soft drink union recently allocated NT$50 million from the recycling fund and purchased reclamation containers from Holland that are shaped like spacemen. They will be deployed in areas open to the public, but these still rely on the public spirit of cooperation.

Because Taiwan is small, the damage from plastic bottles is greater than many countries. But a ban on them could never get off the ground. So regulations need to be more strict than elsewhere. So the EPA uses a rule of thumb that for manufacturers, "however much they can recycle, that's how much they can produce," to cause manufacturers to get more actively into recycling.

Environmental activist Ma Yi-kung points out that to ban or recycle plastic bottles is in itself meaningless, because they constitute less than 7% of all plastic waste. There are also plastic bags, disposable utensils, and all kinds of containers. The ITRI estimates that the total volume of plastic garbage is 700,000 metric tons a year, more than 16% of total refuse.

But even bottles are more "fortunate." Many other products which are too widely used to be banned have no reuse value, the recycling costs are too high, or the recycling technology is not developed. For example, for the number two recyclable product on the EPA list--discarded auto tires--it is still unknown what they can be used for after recycling. Whether or not promoting recycling of these goods will be as smooth as for bottles greatly concerns the EPA.

Though bottle recycling is a new milepost for solving environmental problems, there are still more problems waiting to be re-solved.

[Picture Caption]

The association of soft drink manufacturers has established a recyclingfund, and has imported spacemen to serve as recycling containers.

The success of recycling depends on whether people will throw recyclable rubbish into the appropriate containers.

High-volume, shatter-resistant bottles are now the mainstream in soft drink containers.

High-capacity plastic bottles, mixed up with lots of other junk, are one of the corps of environmental polluters.

Results have been evident at the recycling stations set up by the soft drink industry. At right is a worker crushing the bottles into cubes; then they will be transferred over to the Taiwan Recycling Corporation.

On the street corners of many nations one can see different recycling bins for different products. The photo was taken in Spain. (photo by Arthur Cheng)

Divers sent down to scoop up garbage under "Operation Sea Otter" of the Environmental Protection Administration discovered a lot of plastic bottles.

The future of recycled old auto tires is still up in the air.

The success of recycling depends on whether people will throw recyclable rubbish into the appropriate containers.

High-volume, shatter-resistant bottles are now the mainstream in soft drink containers.

High-capacity plastic bottles, mixed up with lots of other junk, are one of the corps of environmental polluters.

Results have been evident at the recycling stations set up by the soft drink industry. At right is a worker crushing the bottles into cubes; then they will be transferred over to the Taiwan Recycling Corporation.

Results have been evident at the recycling stations set up by the soft drink industry. At right is a worker crushing the bottles into cubes; then they will be transferred over to the Taiwan Recycling Corporation.

On the street corners of many nations one can see different recycling bins for different products. The photo was taken in Spain. （photo by Arthur Cheng）

Divers sent down to scoop up garbage under "Operation Sea Otter" of the Environmental Protection Administration discovered a lot of plastic bottles.

The future of recycled old auto tires is still up in the air.