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n my second night in my apartment in Taichung, Taiwan, I was surprised by a familiar tune, Badarzewska’s “A Maiden’s Prayer”, being played loudly and persistently.

I went out to locate the source. In one corner of the park in front of my apartment were two trucks. A yellow truck — the source of the beautiful classical music — was tailed by a white truck.

What struck me most was the crowd of people approaching the trucks, on foot, by motorcycle and in cars.

People were coming to dispose of their garbage. Most arrived with two plastic bags, one full of recyclable plastic and paper and the other full of wet, compostable food waste.

Those who were disposing other waste materials, such as metal and glass, went to the second truck. The compostable waste had to be unloaded into a special container provided in the tail of the truck, excluding the plastic bag.

The plastic bags used to carry the waste had to be disposed with the recyclable plastics. Those who failed to do so were reprimanded and instructed on how to dispose of them properly by a member of the garbage crew.

For someone like myself, who came from a place with a very different waste management regime — or lack of one — the encounter was truly thought provoking.

Here, the maxim “you are what you eat” is manifested blatantly. Everybody is accountable for their food, whether consumed or wasted. Here was a simple yet striking demonstration of how environmental citizenship works at its best.

In environmental management, concepts on how people could change their attitudes and behaviors toward the environment represent two contrasting values as described by Andrew Dobson from the University of Keele in the United Kingdom: “structuralist” and”‘voluntarist”.

The structuralist believes that attitudes and behaviors are dictated by profound structures. We need to change these structures to change behavior, like providing fiscal incentives to encourage environmentally friendly behavior

However, Britain’s experience has shown that imposing a “rubbish tax” was not very successful. The assumption that people would reduce their household waste to avoid the tax was not met.

Quoting an editorial in The Guardian from 2002, Dobson wrote: “Rather than pay up, the public are likely to vote with their cars and take their rubbish and dump it on the pavement, in the countryside or in someone else’s backyard.”

Dobson argued that a distinction should be made between changes in behavior and changes in attitude, and that the latter would lead to long-lasting changes more than the former.

Environmental citizenship focuses more on changing attitudes, based on the underlying assumption that self-interested behavior would not always protect the environment as a public good, and that the constant focus on self-interested solutions to environmental problems might hinder collective solutions for the common good.

Environmental citizenship thus focuses on the balance between ecological rights and responsibilities.

We have created our own ecological burden by utilizing environmental resources and producing waste. It is, therefore, natural for us to be responsible for the burden we put on the ecosystem.

Taichung’s garbage collection system shows a creative use of music to alert citizens to throwing out their trash. The musical alarm not only helps to discipline citizens, but also creates a joyful atmosphere for garbage disposal. The tunes of “A Maiden’s Prayer” or Beethoven’s “Für Elise” might have been selected by accident — or not.

In music theory, the first few notes of these two classical songs are known as “the perfect fifth”, in contrast to the first two notes of The Simpsons theme song, for instance, or “Maria” from West Side Story, which are known as the “tritone” or the “devil in music”, as Daniel A. Yudkin and Yaacov Trope wrote in 2014 in Scientific American.

Yudkin and Trope wrote: “ponderous, resonant, unfamiliar tonalities cause people to construe things abstractly.

By contrast, the rapid, consonant, familiar chords of the perfect fifth bring out the concrete mindset.”

Thus familiar chords such as those in “A Maiden’s Prayer” and “Für Elise” may indeed be the perfect choice for alerting citizens to act responsibly in disposing of their garbage.
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The writer is a former rector of Soegijapranata Catholic University (UNIKA Soegijapranata) in Semarang, Central Java, and currently a visiting professor at the Department of Food and Nutrition, Providence University, Taichung, Taiwan.