High School Graduates Collect Trash During Festival|夏戀嘉年華落幕 高中女生號召撿垃圾

The eight-day, eight-night Hualien Summer Festival has ended. However, while everyone was enjoying the concerts, there were several female students that decided to go around picking up trash. They hope to raise awareness of keeping their environment clean, and that the county government can face the trash problem head on when holding events.


Several female students walk around the concert venue collecting trash. The Hualien Summer Festival was held next to Dongdamen Night Market, which may have been why most of the trash was food and beverage waste. The girls filled over a dozen garbage bags every night during the festival.

(Did you ask people you find littering to dispose of their trash properly?) They give us their trash. (Really?) They think we are responsible for collecting trash. (But you're actually volunteers, right?) Yes.

Recent Hualien Girls' Senior High School graduate Huang Xiao-han came up with the idea and recruited classmates to help raise awareness on the trash problem created by large-scale events during the eight-day festival.

We use these signs to raise awareness. Hopefully if people see that there are students here that care about this problem, they can reflect on how they are contributing to the problem. We also hope the Hualien County Government can see what we are doing and that this problem exists.

As the girls never contacted local officials, municipal sanitation workers and the nearby night market initially refused to take the collected trash off of the girls' hands. Some concertgoers, meanwhile, thought the girls were maintenance workers and handed their trash to them directly. The girls say they didn't know how to react to this.