Neighborhood trash collection is a breeze, but on the national level, China’s solid waste reaching a dangerous state of crisis.

China’s trash problem is piling up. On many city streets in China, plastic bags, broken glass, rotting food and various other waste items litter the roads and sidewalks in abundance, creating an obstacle course of refuse for cyclists and pedestrians brave enough to ford the mire.

Trash cans are a rare breed, and on some back streets, in lower traffic areas, trash will uniformly blanket the street until a certain area starts to gather debris in a quantity that overshadows the rest of the street. This will become a trash pile. This heap of trash with accumulate with time and traffic, growing in a week or two to the size of a baby elephant, at which point, a government run trash truck will come by and shovel the debris away, leaving nothing more than a wet trail of garbage juice running down the street. In a day or two even the garbage juice vanishes, and soon a new trash pile is born.

Government trash collectors manned with brooms and garbage carts pulled on bikes also patrol the streets, picking up stray debris and keeping the streets as clean as possible.

For household waste, the solution is much simpler. Forget about trash tags, garbage days, or even garbage bags. Most residents of housing complexes reuse plastic shopping bags for trash, and carry this small bag of household and bathroom (no flushing toilet tissue in China) trash out with them every day or so to a trash receptacle below, usually the same style bike cart used by trash collectors on their rounds. The fee for neighborhood trash removal in covered in the Wuye guanli fei, the residence fee, which is usually included in the rent and paid by the landlord.

Whatever you do, don’t throw out your recyclables. There are many people on the streets willing to take care of recycling for you, so leave drink containers and other recyclables beside the trash can, and you will save someone the trouble of having to fish it out of there.

If recycling is piling up in your home, recyclers are happy to make house calls. The building attendant downstairs, or anyone you happen to see handling recycling, should be happy to come up and take it off your hands for free- or they may even be willing you pay you for it, as they will turn around and sell it themselves.

Although the ease of recycling and disposing of trash adds convenience to daily life, on a bigger scale, China faces a serious problem much bigger than a street side trash pile: the waste of other nations. Of the 80% of the world’s e-waste that travels to Asia, almost 90% of that lands up in China.

The “recycling” of both imported and domestic electronics is leeching toxins into the environment, and the level of corruption in China’s government often results in officials turning a blind eye to the smuggling in of foreign e-waste and dangerous refuse being dumped directly into rivers and lakes. In 2005, the UK alone dumped 1.9 million tons of trash into China, including plastic waste shipped to Lianjiao, where it was recycled without human safety precautions, and whose toxic by-produts was dumped directly into rivers. The e-waste processing business creates US$12.8 million a year worth of product and saves 1.2 million tons of raw material and 10 million watts of electricity. However, the e-waste recycling industry has not been regulated to the point where, environmentally speaking, the benefits outweigh the cost.

China’s domestic waste is also rising as quickly as it economy. According to Xinhua, China’s domestic solid waste production is doubling every ten years, including dangerous biohazard hospital waste, e-waste, and animal farm waste, which are all placing a heavy stress on China’s environment.

References:
Imported Pollution Adds to China’s Environmental Woes, Wang Jiaquan. 27 March 2007. Xinhua News Agency. http://www.worldwatch.org/node/4986
China to Tackle Serious Waste Disposal Problem. 25 June, 2003. Xinhua News Agency. http://www.china.org.cn/english/environment/68077.htm

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