Legislators told of problems with wet waste

The city’s agriculture and rural affairs commission told legislators on Friday that the use of wet waste in agriculture was still in its trial stage but there were several problems.

The commission was responding to a legislator at a hearing on garbage sorting at the Shanghai People’s Congress, the city’s legislature, on Friday.

The commission said an experiment to use wet market waste for organic fertilizer began in September with the first products already produced.

One problem was that water content in the waste after processing was still too high ― 80 percent compared with the standard 60 percent. Another problem was excess plastic, which could harm the soil, the commission said.

Wet waste from wet markets was also found to have a low content of organic material, so it could only be used as subsidiary material in the production of organic fertilizer, while restaurant wet waste had too much oil and salt so currently was more ideal as soil conditioner and in city gardening, according to the commission.

The greenery and public sanitation bureau said 15 facilities for the disposal of dry and wet waste in Shanghai will have been built by the end of next year, with nine already constructed. The city would also almost realize “zero burying” of local household waste by the end of this year.

The bureau said 38.8 percent of recyclable waste was recycled, but the handling of this kind of waste was still needed. It aims for a recycling rate of over 40 percent in the next five years with 5 percent more recyclable waste collected.

The ecology and environment bureau said all the hazardous waste collected from household waste is properly handled, with specific waste such as medicine, light tubes and oil barrels disposed of by different professional companies.

A total of 7.3 million tons of hazardous waste were collected in the first 10 months of the year, eight times the amount of the same period last year, the bureau said.

It also said it will work with its counterparts in other provinces in the Yangtze River Delta region in handling hazardous waste.

The science and technology commission said it had supported 51 projects at 48.5 million yuan (US$7.4 million) since 2019 and that seven key projects costing 136 million yuan approved by the national ministry of science and technology in handling solid waste had been carried out in Shanghai.

The commission said it had supported 184 projects in technology innovation in garbage sorting, reduction, collection, transportation, recycling and disposal costing 658 million yuan with 178 million yuan from its own funds from 2003 to 2018.