Household trash has occupied the minds of Shanghai residents this week: Specifically, are the contents of their bins “wet,” “dry,” “hazardous” or “recyclable”?
Residents of the city must arrange their trash according to those labels under a mandatory sorting scheme starting on Monday.
China is in the sixth year of a “war on pollution” designed not only to clean up its skies, soil and water, but also upgrade its heavy industrial economy and “comprehensively utilize” its resources, including waste.
Improving recycling rates is crucial to China’s strategy, and cities are trying to figure out what to do with the heaps of trash clogging up rivers or buried in hazardous landfills.
Shanghai Deputy Secretary-General Huang Rong (黃融) yesterday said that more than 70 percent of residential districts should be compliant with the new trash sorting rules by next year.
“We are just starting out and we are getting ordinary people used to the new system, so we don’t want to make it too complicated,” he told reporters.
However, citizens are finding the system complicated enough, with every item of waste now under careful scrutiny, from receipts and half-eaten crayfish, to soggy cups of bubble tea.
Residents are also unhappy about getting their hands dirty.
“It’s really a lot of trouble,” a 68-year old called Shen said. “Plastic bags have to be put in one bin and if they are dirty they must be cleaned out, and then your hands get filthy. It’s really unhygienic.”
Although Shanghai has hired 1,700 instructors and conducted 13,000 training sessions, residents on social media are demanding to know how to sort items such as batteries, human hair, meat on a bone, or fruit seeds and skins. The government has set up an app to handle inquiries.
Shanghai aims to eventually burn or recycle all waste. By next year, dry waste incineration and wet waste treatment rates are expected to reach 27,800 tonnes a day, about 80 percent of the city’s total garbage.
The city would also restrict the amount of single-use plastic cutlery that food service companies give out, starting on Monday.
China is building hundreds of “waste to energy” plants that use garbage to generate power. It is also establishing a “waste-free city” scheme and constructing high-tech “comprehensive utilization bases” across the nation.
It also slashed imported waste volumes to encourage recyclers to instead tackle growing volumes of domestic trash.
China proposed a trash sorting system in 2000, but guidelines to implement the scheme nationwide were not issued until 2017.
Lawmakers in March warned that China still needed time to roll out the plan nationally, with the nation still needing to build infrastructure, improve incentives and standardize fees.
The biggest challenge is likely to be in rural regions, which not only lack the infrastructure to deal with conventional trash, but also have to handle fertilizer, pesticide and feed waste, as well as plastic mulch.
Shanghai has already had some problems, with some districts reporting truck and land space shortages.
Huang said that the new sorting measures were just the beginning, and would not instantly resolve Shanghai’s mounting garbage challenges.
“We need to step up the propaganda, and we need to step up the construction of infrastructure and guarantee that the separation of trash meets our requirements,” Huang added.
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