Source: The Guardian (12/26/22)
Classical trash: how Taiwan’s musical bin lorries transformed ‘garbage island’
Army of yellow garbage trucks blasting out classical jingles brings out a Pavlovian response to take out bins
By Helen Davidson and Chi Hui Lin in Taipei
Mr Li, a 32-year-old binman in Taipei: “Whenever I hear Für Elise, I feel like I need to take out the garbage as well.’ Photograph: Chi Hui Lin/The Guardian
The sound is inescapable. Wherever you are in Taiwan – be it three beers deep at a city bar, floating in the Taiwan Strait, or hauling yourself up a mountain – you’ll still hear the tinny, off-key classical jingle, and it will trigger a Pavlovian surge of panic: I have to take the bins out.
In the last few decades, Taiwan has transformed itself from “garbage island” to one of the world’s best managers of household trash, and it’s done so with a soundtrack. Armies of yellow trucks trundle through the streets five days a week, blasting earsplitting snippets of either Beethoven’s Für Elise or A Maiden’s Prayer by Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska.
In the Taipei suburb of Guting, Ms Chen, 60, sits on the steps of a Buddhist temple with her neighbour waiting for the trucks to arrive. They and the surrounding neighbours are dressed casually, some in pyjamas and hair curlers, chatting or looking at their phones.
Ms Chen, 60, waits for her trash to be collected: ‘Whenever I hear the music, I always think that I need to hurry up.’ Photograph: Chi Hui Lin/The Guardian
Chen can’t remember the first time she heard the jingle. “It was many, many years ago, a very long time ago,” she tells the Guardian. “Whenever I hear the music, I always think that I need to hurry up to take out the garbage.”
Chen likes the neighbourly catchups the chore enables while they all wait. “If someone hasn’t come out for a long time, I would wonder if anything happened to them [and I check on them].”
When the convoy of trucks arrive, residents swing into action, striding over to the big yellow compactor and expertly lobbing their bags into the back before moving on to give recycling and food scraps to smaller trucks.
The system is different to the weekly collection of wheelie bins at dawn that is more common around the world. The “garbage doesn’t touch the ground” policy requires residents to bring trash directly out of their homes to the trucks, resulting in more hygienic streets in Taiwan’s sweaty climate. Compulsory, government-issued bin bags – priced at less than 1p per litre – have reduced Taipei’s household refuse by two-thirds, the director of the city’s environmental protection bureau says.
“The Taipei city government implemented this system, but it is thanks to the willingness of people in Taipei to work on reducing the garbage together,” says Liou Ming-lone, Taipei’s department of environmental protection commissioner.
Taiwan still has an unhealthy fondness for plastic, but the streets are clean and it boasts one of the world’s highest recycling rates, a claimed 55%. In the early 90s, only 70% of trash was collected at all, prompting a community activist campaign which led to today’s system.
The songs are a key pillar of the system. How they were chosen is subject to a bit of folklore. On a recent Taiwan-focused podcast, Formosa Files, the cohost John Ross said the songs were preloaded on to trucks bought from Japan in the 1960s, and that later attempts to add other songs – including sea shanties and English lessons – were too confusing.
Liou, however, says the trucks were bought from Germany and only played Für Elise. He can’t explain where A Maiden’s Prayer came from. The rumour inside the department is that a former director heard his daughter play it and added it to the playlist.
In November, video clips from a drag show during Taipei Pride went viral. In it, local the drag queen Kimmy Mesula performs as a city garbage worker, tired with her humdrum life and annoying boss. The show climaxes with Kimmy dancing to an electronic remix of the A Maiden’s Prayer jingle.
“Nothing says more about Taiwan’s Pride weekend than a drag queen death dropping to a vogue remix of the bin collection song,” said James Chater, a Taiwan-based British writer who filmed and posted the clips, since viewed almost 30,000 times.
Mesula was surprised the clip took off, albeit slightly annoyed. “It’s not my best performance,” she tells the Guardian. “But everything that happened is good.”
The clip’s popularity was a clear sign of just how embedded the songs have become in the Taiwan psyche, as a point of fun and pride, even a class signifier. “Foreigners don’t know this song. This performance is only for people who take out the trash,” Mesula says.
Fancier high-rises pay building managers to take care of residents’ garbage, but it still doesn’t let them escape the jingle.
Women wait for their government-issued bin bags to be collected in Taipei. Photograph: Chi Hui Lin/The Guardian
Some of the collectors are famously grumpy, haranguing tardy residents for not rushing fast enough, or trying to sneak in a regular plastic bag instead of the government-mandated ones.
In Guting, the 60-year-old collection worker Mr Chen is taking a break with a couple of colleagues inside a ramshackle house in a riverside lane, unmarked except for a gaggle of trucks parked outside.
They laugh when he says many residents have complained about him during his 36 years on the job. “People are not happy when I told them that they should sort the garbage more properly,” he says. “But our jobs are not the hardest. There are people who work harder than us.”
The workers aren’t immune from the Pavlovian response of the tune, says the 32-year-old Mr Li, just six months into the job.
“Whenever I hear Für Elise, I feel like I need to take out the garbage as well.”