Waste disposal fees have been seen as a good way to tackle the country's mounting refuse problems, and foreign examples have constantly been cited in support of the idea.

As to how high the fees should be and how they should be collected, the Environmental Protection Bureau is studying a proposal to add them to people's utility bills, basing them on each household's consumption of water or electricity or some ratio between the two.

Many experts worry, however, that if the fee is added to water and electric bills, the public may reduce its consumption of water and electricity but not its production of refuse.

If people are to cut back on waste production and learn to recycle it, they must be motivated economically. In the advanced countries, this is usually done by controlling quantity through price; that is, by basing fees on the amount of refuse produced.

A similar method has been suggested by Cheng Wen-hui, an assistant professor of public finance at National Chengchi University who made an in-depth study of the problem three years ago. He proposes requiring people to use special bags for waste disposal. Households that produce excessive waste would then have to spend more money to buy the bags.

Environmental officials worry, however, that instead of buying special garbage bags quite a few people would simply dump their trash when no one else was looking. Hsiung Ping-yuan, an assistant professor of economics at National Taiwan University who is studying methods of collecting the fees for the bureau, also believes that the method would lead to "evasive action" by a portion of the public, penalizing law-abiding citizens in the process. Some officials are even concerned that the bags might be pirated.

Still, a number of scholars, including Hsiao Tai-chi, an associate research fellow in the Institute of Economics at Academia Sinica, maintain that the bureau should have more confidence in the public instead of taking the easy way out by tacking the fees on to utility bills. Otherwise, refuse will continue to pile up, and the fees will increase along with it.

Cheng Wen-hui believes that although waste treatment is a national problem, the situation is different in each locality, so imposing a unified method for the whole country is not the right way to go about it.

In Tainan, for instance, garbage trucks drive from door to door, and residents hand up their rubbish to the workers personally. So no one there could hope to dodge a system that charged a fee based on quantity.

But in Taipei, where most people live in multi-unit apartment buildings and where no one knows whose garbage is whose, levying a charge on utility bills may be the only practicable approach.

In fact, the various collection methods touted by experts seem all to be practiced only in particular cities or places.

Cheng cites the example of a community in Japan in which residents write their names on their trash bags and separate burnable, nonburnable, and toxic items. If the garbagemen catch someone breaking the rules, they immediately blare out over a loudspeaker: "Mr. So-and-So, you haven't separated your refuse! Please, don't this again!" These moral sanctions have succeeded in reducing the community's waste treatment costs at a very low level. The residents may be put to a little extra trouble, but they save quite a bit of money in the long run.

"Refuse is a local matter, after all, and each place can handle it best according to its own circumstances,' Cheng concludes.

In particular, the problem that everyone experiences most directly--that of thought lessly discarded garbage spoiling the looks of the city--should be narrowed to the community level. It's not necessary to compel every citizen to "love greater Taipei"; all that people have to do is show some concern for their own neighborhoods. If community leaders organized neighborhoods so that each family kept its trash to itself and respected the rights of others, then the refuse problem would be halfway solved already.

Unfortunately, many neighborhoods are not so well run. Speaking from his own experience, Cheng says his community leader kept telling him he was "embarrassed" to do anything. "If you're so bashful," he replied, "then what are you doing as our leader? Aren't things like this exactly what a community leader's supposed to do?"

It's not that there are no examples of success. You won't see piles of uncollected garbage in the neighborhood around the Examination Yuan in Mucha, because the community there met with its leader, estimated how much refuse each house hold produced, and bought trash containers for everybody--with lids, because it rains there a lot.

If we think that all our refuse problems will be solved by a fee without our doing anything about them ourselves, we're being a little naive.

[Picture Caption]

Trash--another worry turning from a molehill into a mountain for the government. Charging fees for dealing with trash is the current trend.

Solving the trash problem also requires separating garbage, collecting what's reusable, and recycling it. (photo by Vincent Chang)

A garbage can especially for batteries on a street in Holland.

Solving the trash problem also requires separating garbage, collecting what's reusable, and recycling it. （photo by Vincent Chang）

A garbage can especially for batteries on a street in Holland.