China vows to recycle its trash
Chen Liwen was nothing but encouraging as she pulled out the plastic bags that had been thrown mixed in the food-scraps bucket with the corn husks and the egg shells.
“You did great,” she said to the store owner, explaining that the plastic should go into the yellow container, not the green one. “Next time you can do even better.”
After all, it was only the second day of supervised trash sorting in Xicai village, a dusty collection of about 480 houses with no indoor plumbing in Hebei province, outside Beijing.
Those residents include Chen’s parents. So the zerowaste advocate decided to start her campaign to teach China to recycle here, in her hometown.
“You need to organize people to start a waste reduction system, and it’s hard in the city because there are too many people,” said Chen, who leads the environmental group China Zero Waste Alliance and is trying to teach the nation to recycle, one village at a time.
“In the villages, people know each other, so it’s not so hard to organize people. Also, they have land, so composting can be done very easily,” she said.
Up until the 1980s, there was relatively little garbage in China.
The country was poor, so people didn’t buy much, and they certainly didn’t waste much.
Then came the economic boom. Mountains of consumerist trash. Computer parts, plastic packaging, milk cartons, broken cellphones, polystyrene, cardboard boxes.
Now, with the prevalence of food delivery services — a customer can get a cup of bubble tea or a single soft-serve ice cream delivered in China for a nominal fee — and online shopping, there are new kinds of trash.
Although the average Chinese person produces about half the solid waste of the average American, there are many more people in China. That means China throws out about 60 million takeout food containers every day.
But there is no real recycling system. Instead, there’s an informal network of “trash pickers” — usually migrants from rural areas who come to the city to scour through urban garbage — who extract anything of value from refuse bins and take it to huge sorting centres outside the city.
This means that recycling only happens when it’s profitable. Buried under waste, the Chinese government is trying to change this.
The Chinese government is very good at writing rules, analysts say, but less so at enforcing them.
Chen, who became an environmentalist in college and started her NGO in 2009, is going to try. She is taking matters into her own hands, starting in villages around where she grew up.
Chen’s father, Chen Lianxiang, is proud of the impact that his daughter has had on the village, even if he laments the fact that she deals with trash all day long.
“There was garbage everywhere in the past,” he said.