| Divide and Conquer
Household Garbage Segregation and Treatment
By staff reporter JIAO FENG
THE concept of sorting refuse was introduced to China some 10 years ago. In 2000, the then Ministry of Construction (now the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development) designated eight cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, as the first batch of pilot cities to implement household garbage segregation.
On June 20 this year, three ministries jointly released a plan to promote segregated collection and treatment of household garbage across the country and improve related facilities for both dry and wet waste. The project aims to realize sealed collection and transportation of household garbage and the separation of kitchen waste from other wastes in urban areas by the end of 2015.
Put It in the Right Box!
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| What goes where? Sorting waste is a community effort. |
Wang Fengqin is a sorting guide in Maizidian Beili Community in Beijing’s Chaoyang District. Her job is to check every rubbish bag and fish out anything that has gone into the wrong bin. “You need gloves for this work. In the early days I got through three pairs a day, but now one pair is enough,” she says. “Sixty percent of the residents here know to sort their garbage and put different types in different places.”
Maizidian Beili is one of the pilot projects in Beijing. Its community committee distributed pamphlets to guide householders in sorting garbage, and organized community coaches to show residents how to go about it.
Since early this year, over 600 communities and 30 percent of government organizations in Beijing have implemented garbage sorting pilot schemes. A community garbage segregation guide receives a certain amount of economic help for his/her services. The number of the city’s pilot communities is expected to reach 3,000 in 2011.
That said, thorough coverage of sorting programs is still a long way off. Ms. Wu lives in a residential community built in 2006, but the trash bins are still unsegregated, with just one bin in front of each building and one in the parking garage, neither of them marked. But Ms. Wu can sort out recoverable waste at home, and her part-time cleaner Ms. Jiang takes it to sell at a nearby reclamation depot. Ms. Jiang does cleaning for 10 families every week and says, “Of the residential communities where I do work, four or five have separate trash bins for recyclable and ‘other’ rubbish.”
Special Waste
Special bins for the disposal of spent batteries have been installed in public areas of Beijing since 2006, and companies specializing in battery recycling have also been set up. The National Hazardous Wastes List was updated in 2008 by government departments, providing guidance on the recycling of such items.
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