Putuo's garbage sorting is easy, fun and efficient
As garbage sorting becomes the in thing to do, some old communities in the northwest downtown have come up with trendy new ideas to keep trash train on track.
At the Ganquan Road subdistrict, in Putuo on Thursday, volunteers, sanitation workers and neighborhood officials showed of their latest tricks.
The bins for household food waste can be really heavy and so the district has trolleys that can easily shift 300 kilograms of garbage.
Another tool tears open plastic bags. People must open plastic bags and toss the kitchen waste into one bin while the bag goes in another. A small saw inside the bin, the brainchild of a local resident, will soon be in use across the city.
A gizmo at garbage rooms across Putuo grinds, chops and pulverizes food waste on site. The unit shreds waste into pieces small enough to be treated as sewage. More than 60 percent of our daily 20,000 tons of waste is food. It rots and it stinks. It contains large amounts of water and oil that make it difficult to process.
An app embedded in the QQ browser that can recognize over 400 kinds of waste through a smart phone and tell you exactly which bin it should be dumped in.
Correct sorting has meant the amount of the household food waste has increased to 500 tons per day in Putuo from only 34 tons in June. About 90 percent of that food waste is correctly sorted.