She Likes to Talk Trash

By Macabe Keliher/Taipei

A tour of Wu Chao-Chih's domain is potentially perilous. As the agile Taiwanese woman leads visitors through a cluttered site in suburban Taipei, she warns them to watch out for jagged steel and rusted pipes. But she doesn't seem too nervous about the crane that swings a ton of scrap metal just overhead.

On an island full of "clean rooms" where computer chips are made, Wu, 51, feels more at home in grimy junkyards. As founder and head of the Taiwan Second Resource Recycling Cooperative, she is synonymous with big-time recycling in one of Asia's fastest-growing economies. Working with about 100 recycling companies belonging to her cooperative, she coordinates efforts to collect industrial and consumer trash, salvage everything, from paper and plastic to scrap steel, and mold the refuse into raw materials to feed Taiwan's factories. Out of that garbage heap comes treasure. Last year the co-op brought in more than $100 million from customers like China Steel and Formosa Plastics. But money is not the motivation behind Wu's not-for-profit outfit. After paying office charges and the modest salaries of Wu and her staff of seven, recycling revenues go to co-op members, whose scrap yards provide thousands of jobs to poor, relatively unskilled Taiwanese.

It was a desire to work with the underprivileged that got Wu, who took accounting in college, interested in recycling. After spending six years in the U.S. and Japan studying that industry, she returned home in 1989 to find Taiwanese recycling in disarray. National laws required that manufacturers pay fees to subsidize the reuse of materials from such products as bottles and cars. But independent foundations were set up to receive the money, and critics charged that little ever went to recycling firms.

After Wu organized the recyclers and mobilized 100,000 people for a protest march in Taipei, the Taiwanese government investigated the foundations, concluded they were not doing the job and closed them down. Now the manufacturers' fees are funneled to the recycling companies that Wu represents.

During her campaign, Wu made enemies of the government bureaucrats who had been regulating recycling. Perhaps not coincidentally, her co-op was charged with evading taxes in a case that is still winding through the courts. Wu denies the accusation and has no regrets about forcing Taiwan to get serious about recycling. "I established a genuine movement," she says, "and helped many people without a voice."

--By Macabe Keliher/Taipei