existential struggles in greater China and southeast Asia
I haven’t brought it up on the blog before, but those of you who know me may have heard me rave about the live/indie music scene in Beijing. There are a number of venues that have live music performances on most nights, and a lot of artists worth seeing and following.
This is the first public battery recycling point I’ve seen in China – and guess which city it was in?
Not Beijing, not Shanghai, but…beautiful Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, home of spicy and numbing food!
The dark side of this story is that Chengdu apparently doesn’t have the technology and resources to actually recycle these batteries, so they are being stored in warehouse purgatory, patiently awaiting a day in the future when they can be reincarnated or perhaps reach battery nirvana.
Similar problems plague battery collection programs in Tianjin and Beijing, as well as collection programs for other toxic products such as CFLs.  If you know of any economically viable recycling technologies that can be brought over to China, please leave me a comment or send an email. We’ll make millions!
I haven’t seen these on the mainland yet, but they are sorely needed. I have to admit, I haven’t been a good paper recycler since I’ve been in China. Very ashamed.
Paper recycling bin in Taipei Metro
I don’t want to take up a lot of space defending my reasons for including a post about Taiwan in a blog discussing “Environmentalism in China.” Let’s just leave it at a fact that nobody can deny: Taiwan is the operational base of a political entity called ROC, aka the Republic of China.
I spent a bit of time in Taipei when I was a kid in the 80s and early 90s. I have vivid memories of how dirty t he place was, at least compared to where I grew up in the U.S. I remember being shocked when I came back to Taiwan as an adult in 2002, about eleven years after my previous visit. The skies were blue, the rivers and creeks were clear, the streets were free of dog poo (we used to call it 黄金 (huang jin, meaning yellow gold), and that distinctive Taipei smell (those of you who visited Taiwan in the 80s and 90s know exactly what I’m talking about – a mix of rotting plant matter and sewage) had all but disappeared.
Here’s a picture I took near one of my favorite bookstores in the world, the Eslite (èª å“書店，Chengpin shudian) in Xinyi district, Taipei. Visible in the picture is the Taipei 101 tower, the tallest skyscraper in the world for a few months before the Burj Khalifa in Dubai overtook it in 2004.
I marveled out loud at how blue the sky was, and my cousin and his friends, Taipei locals, told me that the air quality was not as good as usual because many people were making burnt offerings for ä¸åŽŸæ™®æ¸¡, a festival that’s celebrated in the seventh month of the lunar calendar to pay homage to wandering ghosts. I asked them if they remembered when the sky was always grey and looks of bewilderment shaded their faces. “No, the sky is always blue on sunny days, and usually even bluer than today!”
I turned to my cousin and asked him if he remembered when we were kids and, after playing outside all day, we would run our fingernails along our arms and scrape off a layer of black, like ink under our nails? Or how our boogers would always be black from the air pollution (kind of like what happens in Beijing now)? <Warning – the next picture is not for the faint of heart> Continue reading
Chinese people celebrate the harvest season and the brightest full moon of the year on the fifteenth day of the eight month of the lunar calendar, which falls on September 22 this year. Happy mid-autumn festival! Time to eat moon cake!
