People from Hebei Province specialize in the wholesale purchase and transport of scrap. There are six large junk trading markets around the outskirts of Beijing, and every day more than 10,000 people from Hebei make deals there. Take shoe soles as example. Henan scrap collectors buy them for RMB 1 per kilogram, and sell them at a price of RMB 1.2 per kilogram on this market. Hebei scrap wholesalers classify and segregate the shoe soles and sell them to different factories. The profits are considerable.

Most scrap collectors from Sichuan just solicit unwanted items door to door, or even rummage in trash heaps. The job is dirty and tiring, and the income is the lowest, in general RMB 1,000 a month. Du Maoxiang and Xu Jicai, two farmers from Bazhong, Sichuan Province, came to Beijing in 1989. They asked for approval to enter a large dump site. The Beijing Municipal Administration of Environmental Sanitation (now Beijing Municipal Commission of City Services and Image) gave permission. “Why not? Better if they can sort through all the garbage and find things to recycle,” remarks Wang Weiping, a senior engineer. It actually costs the city to dispose of garbage; the government pays RMB 150 for collecting, transporting and treating just one ton.

Soon Du and Xu led a small army of 500 fellow Sichuanese into the largest garbage disposal field, all at once. Now more than 4,000 people from Sichuan’s Bazhong and Yilong counties are picking scraps in Beijing.

Besides the Sichuanese, a number of local inhabitants are also engaged in picking scraps, many of them retirees. At the entrance of the Summer Palace, this reporter met an old man collecting plastic bottles. He says that he is idle after retirement. His interest was aroused seeing migrant scrap collectors. Early every day he comes here from his home 10 kilometers away, and at its end sells the plastic bottles he picked to vendors at the price of RMB 0.1 per bottle. His income from a day’s toil is RMB 20-30. “My senior citizens’ ID card gets me free entrance to parks and free rides on buses, so my business overhead is nothing,” the old man says happily.

What’s the official word on how many people are engaged in scrap collecting in Beijing? In 2006, 300,000 people were engaged in this trade, according to a survey by a research fellow of the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, and generating a whopping RMB 3 billion per year. Statistics also indicate that in 2009 Beijing recycled 4 million tons of scraps, a volume double that of Jingshan Hill behind the Forbidden City.