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China's garbage has dangerous allure for scavenging peasants

Song Tiping, a peasant from rural Jiangsu Province, sits at a garbage dump in Shanghai on March 21. Song scavenges for items that he can sell for scrap. PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE

Song Tiping, a peasant from rural Jiangsu Province, and Bernie Kearsley-pratt, an Australian executive, would not at first glance seem to have much in common, and they do not, except for one thing: Both were drawn here by the unlikely financial promise of garbage, towering mountains of refuse that attest to this city's status as a raging boomtown.

And now they spend their days in a cat-and-mouse game, Song joining throngs of poor Chinese scavenging in the trash and Kearsley-pratt, who manages Shanghai's largest municipal dump, trying to keep them out.

The Australian, who works for a French company that is helping manage this city's garbage, says his difficult job is made all the harder -- indeed on some days he himself would say impossible -- by the cruel fact that even in the heartland of a booming China, peasants can make far more money collecting plastic trash bags, tin cans and the rubber soles of shoes than they can as farmers or ordinary day laborers.

Most days Song, who came to Shanghai seeking a way to pay the hefty tuition fees for his eldest daughter, who had been admitted to one of the country's best high schools, spends several hours dodging monstrous earthmoving equipment in the landfill, one of the largest in Asia, to pick trash.

Were it not for dangers of the job, like being crushed by a bulldozer, inhaling noxious gases while wading knee-deep in fetid refuse or being beaten by warring gangs of scrap pickers for the mere prize of an unbroken bottle, it might even be considered a good job.

"We worked really hard as laborers before, doing 12 to 15-hour days for a mere few hundred yuan [about US$35]," Song said.

"You have to work even if you are sick or tired. Here we are working for ourselves, and there is a lot more freedom -- four to five hours a day, plus we can earn a lot more," he said.

Each morning, on average, 5,715 tonnes of garbage arrive by barge from the central city. Kearsley-pratt's company, Onyx, won an international bidding competition in 2003 to replace an old municipal landfill next door that had observed almost no environmental precautions with a state of the art dump -- a fenced-in area slightly larger than New York's Central Park. To do so, Onyx has invested millions of dollars in heavy equipment, environmental measures and training.

The plan was for a plant that would safeguard the water table and produce enough natural gas to power a small city -- in short, the cleanest, safest, most modern landfill imaginable -- until the scavengers showed up. They came in ones and twos, like Song and his wife, and in roving gangs, organized according to their place of origin in the poor and far-flung Chinese countryside. Now, according to all sides in what appears to be a mounting dispute, what they have is one fine mess.

"Everyone has a big challenge when they come to China," Kearsley-pratt said.

He warmed to his subject slowly, talking about how no living-room couch, no matter how abused, would ever make it from a Shanghai curbside to his dump, because someone needier than the owner would quickly haul it away.

Finally, he got to the meat of the problem: The scavengers who descend each day upon his dump like freebooters on a diamond mine.

"As soon as you tip the truck there will be 40 or 50 people running all about the machines -- quite big machines," he said. "I don't have the statistics, but quite a few people have been crushed like this."

Under the circumstances, tempers sometimes flare. As crews of Kearsley-pratt's workers rushed to lay tarpaulins over a field of freshly laid garbage, a female scavenger in her 50s approached a group of foreigners taking pictures of the scene.

"We are just trying to make a livelihood, to eat," she shouted.

"Unless you have come to help us survive, we don't want your attention," she said.
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