Shanghai tries to reduce its trash, 1 chicken bone at a time
SHANGHAI — China’s biggest city has dived headfirst into a trash sorting program that marks the country’s first serious attempt at cutting the amount of garbage headed for landfills.
But despite a sweeping education campaign by the ruling Communist Party and the threat of fines, Shanghai’s 26 million residents still have a ways to go in changing their lifestyles and getting with the program — one properly disposed chicken bone at a time.
Months ahead of the campaign’s launch in July, the government began its push to explain to Shanghai’s young and old how garbage will need to be sorted into four categories: wet, dry, recyclable and hazardous.
From choreographed dances with trash bins to fliers sent to 6.8 million families and a scorecard for participating neighborhoods, efforts to roll out the system en masse have reflected the Communist Party’s allencompassing approach to rules enforcement.
There’s lot of garbage to get through. About 9 million tons of household trash a year, according to 2017 data from Shanghai’s Statistics Bureau. The government hopes the new sorting measures will reduce the amount of waste headed for landfills by making it easier to recycle or compost some of the trash.
“It is going to take a generation to really accomplish it,” said Du Huanzheng, a selfdescribed “trash professor.”
“It is a change of habits,” said Du, a professor at Tongji University in Shanghai who has served as an adviser for the new program. Quoting a Chinese proverb, he said: “It’s easier to change the rivers and mountains than a person’s nature.”
On a recent day in downtown Shanghai, 67yearold Zhang Guihua stood in front of an apartment complex’s trash disposal area with bins for the four new trash categories.
Zhang, who works as a caregiver in the complex, said the rules have no doubt made taking out the trash more timeconsuming. For instance, while the elderly woman she works for generally only has one bag of garbage to throw out at a time, Zhang now has to pick out the trash by hand before sorting it into the different bins.
“It is troublesome,” Zhang said. “My hands get dirty after dealing with it and there’s no place for me to wash my hands.”
Online commentators have pointed out that distinguishing one type of waste from another is no easy task. While chicken bones are officially classified as wet, pork bones are considered dry. Dry mushrooms are in fact wet, and wet tissues are actually dry.
One strategy for identification that has been spreading online is to think of the trash in terms of pigs: Trash is wet if pigs can eat it, and dry if not; trash is hazardous if it can kill pigs, but recyclable if it can be sold to earn cash to buy more pigs.