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programs.  Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. For entire piece, please visit: http://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/taiwans-recycling-revolution-lessons-for-canada-4816/ Taiwan’s Recycling Revolution: Lessons for Canada By: Zachary Fillingham May 27th, 2013 Taiwan and Canada, two countries on opposite sides of the planet: one has reduced its per-capita daily waste by 57.5% from 1998 to 2010, a period which coincided with 47% GDP growth, and the other continues to churn out more waste per capita than any of its global peers. How they got to be on opposing sides of the problem/solution line merits some consideration, especially if Canadian cities are ever going to get serious about waste reduction. Of all the obvious differences between the two, it’s geography that looms the largest. Taiwan is a mountainous island roughly the size of the Netherlands, with most of its 23 million people packed into five coastal cities. Canada’s population of 35 million inhabits the second-largest country in the world, and this vast amount of space has entrenched a myth of abundance in the Canadian political imagination, that of abundant water, forests, minerals, arable land, and most recently oil as well. It was geography that pushed waste disposal to the top of the political debate in Taiwan during the 1980s. After a decade of explosive economic growth, the island was running out of places to dump its waste. Existing landfills, like Neihu’s ‘garbage mountain’ on the outskirts of Taipei, were at overcapacity and pressing up against major population centers. The Taiwanese Environmental Protection Agency (TEPA) responded to mounting political pressure by drafting up a plan to build 21 large incinerators throughout Taiwan in 1990, and an additional 15 in 1996. But this was not the type of solution that the Taiwanese public had in mind. The incinerator plan came up against a groundswell of environmental opposition. Grassroots organizations petitioned the government and staged protests up and down the island, voicing their firm opposition to incinerators on the basis of community health and environmental protection. The government finally relented in 2003 and adopted a ‘zero waste policy’ as the central tenet of its waste reduction strategy. For entire piece, please visit: http://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/taiwans-recycling-revolution-lessons-for-canada-4816/  follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend  Copyright © 2013 Geopoliticalmonitor.com, All rights reserved.  You are receiving this email because you opted in at our website.  Our mailing address is:  Geopoliticalmonitor.com 5700-100 King Street West Toronto, On M5X1C7 Canada