Shanghai gears up for garbage sorting
Yin Yicui (left), head of the Standing Committee of the Shanghai People’s Congress, leads a team of city legislators in inspecting a few locations over their garbage-sorting efforts on Tuesday. She talks to Fu Lishi, administrator of the garbage terminal at Hongqiao Shijia Huayuan, a residential complex in Changning District.
The daily amount of recyclable waste collected in Shanghai last month exceeded 3,200 tons, 15 times more than 2017, the government said on Tuesday.
Also in May, the daily amount of wet waste was 6,220 tons, a 77 percent rise from 2017.
With the first garbage-sorting regulation in Shanghai set to take effect on July 1, residents and companies are getting ready to meet the legal requirements. City legislators made a tour to several locations for an inspection on Tuesday afternoon.
At Hongqiao Shijia Huayuan, a residential complex in Changning District, over 90 percent of its 580 residents now drop their sorted-out garbage at the complex's waste terminal during fixed hours every day, according to the residents' committee.
Also, since the garbage-sorting rules were introduced in October last year, the daily amount of garbage collected has apparently been reduced by 1.2 tons since then.
Yang Fudi, head of the residents’ committee, said most of the residents can drop their sorted out garbage from 7am to 10am and from 5pm to 8pm although initially there were some doubts about the conditions.
“We assured them that after all garbage bins inside the buildings are gone, they will all live in a better environment, and they gradually took to it,” she said.
Fu Lishi, administrator of the complex's garbage terminal, said if some residents miss the scheduled time for garbage dropping, he opens the "little house" which functions as the terminal for them and is locked up otherwise. He also makes sure to check every bag of garbage to see if the waste is properly sorted.
“I hardly have to resort the garbage these days, although my working hours are much longer than before, because I used to get off work at 2pm before the garbage-sorting rules were brought on,” he noted.
Yin Yicui checks out garbage bins at the waste-sorting area of Hongqiao International Airport.
At the Asia-Pacific headquarters of the German company Bosch, also in Changning District, garbage-sorting rules have been introduced in every office of the building in which about 2,500 employees work.
Instead of discarding garbage in little dust bins under their desks, the workers now sort out and drop it in garbage bins located elsewhere on the same floor.
“As a result, our offices have generated more wet waste than before, so we added two more garbage containers for such waste,” said a manager surnamed Zhang from the company’s department in charge of infrastructure planning.
Also, the company collected an additional 1.5 tons of recyclable waste last year than in 2017 when 2.4 tons of such waste was collected, a result of garbage sorting, Zhang explained.
“Our employees can recognize recyclable waste most easily among all kinds of trash,” she said. “They will gradually learn to sort out residual waste from wet waste because for example, some still take used napkins as wet waste.”
At the Hongqiao International Airport, the terminals’ operational management team said the 1,500 garbage bins inside the airport have been reduced to 800, but there is no littering by passengers. However, the waste collected has to be sorted out in their garbage-sorting area since the waste-sorting rules are still not known to all.
Most of the garbage at the airport is “residual waste” — garbage which is not recyclable nor wet or harmful to the environment, so this type of waste is transported away three times a day, while wet and recyclable waste is transported away once a day.
Among recyclable waste, paper board boxes, drink cans and plastic bottles take a giant share, according to the airport.
