Shanghai not wasting its waste
The city authorities have introduced a range of programs designed to promote good habits. Xing Yi reports.
Is used tissue paper “dry” or “wet” garbage, and to which category of trash does hair belong? Those are just two examples of the sort of questions that confused Qi Daolun when her neighborhood joined a trash sorting program that started in April.
The 84-year-old Shanghai resident’s confusion was short-lived, though, and within a few days she had become a pro at sorting domestic trash.
Qi, a retired Party cadre, lives with her husband and son in a residential community in the city’s Chengjiaqiao subdistrict.
By September, 27 communities in Chengjiaqiao had joined the program of household waste sorting and fixedtime collections. “I didn’t take trash sorting seriously before, but now I realize that it is a good thing and everyone should do it,” Qi said.
She added that she learned about the different categories of trash at lectures delivered by social workers and volunteers, and, most important, at the neighborhood trash station.
Lin Jing serves as an official on Qi’s community committee, and a major part of her job is to implement the municipal government’s campaigns to promote better sorting of household waste.
She and her colleagues started educating local people about trash sorting in 2013, using a range of measures to promote the concept.
Earlier this year, they gave lectures to all the households in the 27 neighborhoods and handed every family a trash bin with separate chambers for dry and wet waste.
“We have seen incremental progress in people’s attitudes and practice, especially after the neighborhood started the fixed-time trash collection program,” Lin said.
When the program was launched, Lin visited the trash station every day to ensure that people used the appropriate bins for dry garbage (general household waste), wet garbage (food waste), hazardous waste (batteries, electronic items and related trash), and recyclables.
She also asked people to make sure they used different bags for different types of trash, and when she disposed of the bags, she opened them to see if they had complied.
“It was a lot of work at first, but it is the most effective way of teaching people about sorting trash and encouraging the right behavior,” she said.
Soon, Lin didn’t need to visit every day because people had become accustomed to sorting their trash and placing it in the right receptacle.
Even the local security guard volunteered to help by opening the trash station at the designated times — 7:30 to 9:30 am and 4:30 to 7:00 pm every day — when residents dispose of their trash and waste treatment companies send trucks to collect it.
Long-term action plan
In March, the Shanghai municipal government published an action plan to implement the sorting of household waste across the city, and made it clear that every residential community in every district would be required to operate a trash sorting program by 2020.
The aim is to reduce the daily volume of dry waste from 21,400 metric tons to 18,100 tons.
Meanwhile, the amount of wet waste, mainly kitchen leftovers, which can be reused as compost or fertilizer, must be increased from 3,480 tons to 6,300 tons a day, and the daily volume of recyclables, including plastics and papers, should rise from 660 tons to 1,100 tons.
“Trash sorting is an important step in achieving harmless treatment and effective disposal of solid waste,” said Liu Chang, deputy chief engineer at the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development’s Environmental Sanitation Engineering Technology Research Center.
Currently, landfills and incineration are the dominant methods of treating waste in China, but properly sorted trash can save space in landfills, which have a limited area, while certain types of dry waste can be burned as fuel for incineration plants.
“The amount of household waste produced in China is rising every year, and the solid waste treatment industry is developing at high speed as well,” Liu said.
“But there is still a huge gap between the waste we produce and our ability to treat it,” he added, estimating the shortfall at about 30,000 tons a day.
“Sorting our trash will help to close the gap.”
Innovation
Shanghai has a history of innovative waste treatment. In 2000, it was selected as one of eight pilot cities to implement a trash sorting program, and over the years the city has launched several campaigns to promote and implement the practice.
Since August, a new round of trash sorting has been carried out in many parts of the city, and pamphlets and brochures have been printed and handed out in schools and residential communities to ensure that residents are fully aware of the ongoing campaign.
In addition, teams of volunteers, including university students and retirees, are instructing residents about garbage classification, according to the municipal volunteer association.
Last month, authorities designated the fifth of every month as a trash sorting-themed day.
Moreover, new technology is being used at pilot trash stations equipped with smart recycling bins fitted with sensors that can identify the type of trash and pay people who deliver it. Because they are linked to the internet, the smart bins can notify the trash recycling company when they are almost full.
New supervision systems are being tested, too. In Fengxian district, Party members and local officials have been assigned to garbage stations as “trash bin chiefs”, responsible for supervising sorting in specific areas.
Last year, Shanghai issued mandatory rules for sorting trash that specifically targeted waste produced in work places, including government offices, public institutions and businesses.
The Shanghai Municipal Administration of Afforestation and City Appearance, whose main tasks include waste transportation and treatment, sent notices to 50,000 offices and handled 557 cases in which office buildings failed to comply with the rules. Last year, it handed out fines totaling 20,000 yuan ($2,900).
As a result, many office buildings have upgraded their trash bins. During the summer, Liu Peng, a worker at an advertising company, discovered that his office building on Huaihai Road in the downtown had replaced its one large trash can with three different bins.
“I didn’t sort my trash before, but I will do so now, even though it requires a little effort,” he said.
In August, notices were posted in the entrance of his office building to inform all the companies in the complex that they were required to sort their own trash. Zhao Jianming, the building’s manager, praised the program, and said he has made it his personal responsibility to see that all the trash is sorted.
Niu Debi, a cleaner in the building, said she has to check the trash bins and pick out garbage that has been placed in the wrong container, which has raised her workload but not her paycheck.
Slow progress
Despite the various measures taken in Shanghai in recent years, the progress of trash sorting in general is still slow because while most people know about it, few actually practice it, despite years of education.
Michael Rosenthal, a United States national who has lived in Shanghai for 13 years and founded US Green Solutions, a waste treatment company, said the key to overcoming the problem is better and more stringent standards and regulations set by the government, and more companies developing new technology.
“That said, public cooperation is also important,” he said. “To see green practices becoming more common in China and people’s behavior changing in just a few years is truly an amazing thing.”
In addition to those factors, Qi, the old Party member in Chengjiaqiao, is convinced that determination and motivation are also essential to improve the situation.
“It’s all about people’s mindsets; just lift a finger and it’s done, so why not do the right thing?” she said.
Yu Ruyue contributed to this story.