As China is changing its recycling policies, cities are trying to adapt to the new regulatory landscape. Community initiatives are considered central in teaching citizens how to rethink their relationship to garbage and food waste, just as their levels of consumption increase.
What garbage are you (你是什么垃圾)? That is the question the citizens of Shanghai are jokingly asking each other, these days. It is their way to deal with the decision of the city authorities to enforce new rules for sorting garbage. There are four categories: hazardous waste (batteries and other toxic materials), recyclable (paper, metal, glass, clothes), „wet” (household food waste) and „dry” (residual waste such as bones, used baby pampers, and food wrappers). In principle, it is not difficult to understand the difference, but in practice it is not always easy to figure out what category a specific piece of garbage belongs to, especially when a lot of social pressure is imposed through the city authorities engagement in the initiative. Neighborhood associations organize ways to control and make sure that everybody sorts their garbage correctly. When a metropolis like Shanghai, with its over twenty-four million inhabitants, changes the way garbage, the impact is enormous.
The city policy is a local reflection of much larger decisions at the national level that have had a huge impact worldwide, throwing the global recycling industry in disarray. For years, the desire to tackle the plastic garbage problem in the industrialized countries of the Global North, an urgent environmental issue that also constituted a constant reminder of the ethical shortcomings of excessive consumption, was also practically viable and financially sound. In fact, it made economic sense to recycle plastic, incurring in the necessary expenses to sort, clean, and store it, because China would buy it in great quantity to produce all sorts of goods. This arrangement, which lasted for over three decades also due to the decreasing prices of container transportation, has come to a sudden halt because the Chinese government has banned the import of various types of recyclable materials while introducing much stricter contamination standards. Among the motivations, observers have pointed out the rising labor costs in China and the growing quantities of recyclable waste produced internally, an unintended consequence of higher standards of living.
At the local level, new regulations are being established to reflect the national policy. In all Chinese metropolises, all sort of initiatives are being launched to bring the city directives to fruition. During my recent trip to Shanghai, thanks to my New York University doctoral student Cheng Qiu and her friend Liu Ziwei, I had he opportunity to visit the Meilong Third Village (梅陇三村), an urban residence unit where a women’s association, the Green Housewives (绿主妇), has developed a very interesting and multifaceted recycling initiative, with the support of the local neighborhood cell of the Communist Party. According to Cheng Qiu, “the non-profit community organization was founded in 2011 when around ten housewives took an environmental class at the community center and learned about the tremendous urban waste that Shanghai was generating every day. ‘For only 16 days, the waste can be piled into a Jin Mao Tower (a 420-meter high skyscraper of Shanghai)!’ Shocked by the amount of waste, and worried about the environmental pollution for the future generations, the women started to sort waste in their residential unit.Their motto is ‘waste is a resource that is put in wrong places’!”.
Recycling is taken very seriously: discarded food packaging, such as juice cartons, are used to create all sorts of objects, from food containers to shopping baskets. The carton boxes used for food transportation become chairs.
Organic scraps are turned into compost and non-polluting disposable elements by dedicated machinery located near the recycling bins. The compost is mostly brought to a farm in the nearby Chongming island for further refinement to grow rice and vegetable, but part is used to grow vegetables in the unit in raised beds that provide not only a communal activity, as many forms of urban agriculture do, but fresh produce that is then distributed among the oldest members of the residence unit. The food deliveries become an occasion for younger women to socialize with the elderly, who may experience various degree of loneliness. The unit also boasts a photovoltaic power generator, used to run the recycling and composting machinery, and water-saving taps that reduce the water used for the irrigation of the vegetable beds. Last but not least, some of the organic waste, such as unused fruits and vegetables as well as food scraps from home kitchens, is fermented into liquids that can be used as a fertilizers in the farm, as they are supposed to restore the soil microbiome. Furthermore, when such liquids are fermented in anaerobic conditions, they develop a good smell and can also be drunk to improve the human intestinal microbiome.
Food scraps brought to the unit garbage center for disposal are weighed and remunerated with a virtual currency that exists in a mobile application and can be used to buy products (incudling the rice and vegetables from the Chongming farm) in a little store and the automatic distributors scattered in the residential unit. What struck me was the systemic thinking these women – obviously with the help of the local Party representatives and external experts – had applied to deal with the garbage their own residence unit generates. Waste reduction, recycling, composting, and disposal were all conceived as connected elements in a large network of practices, materials, and people. These activities certainly help the neighbors to apply the new city directives, but also provide them with a sense of empowerment and pride for their achievements, an aspect that is not negligible in a huge conglomeration like Shanghai, which can often be isolating.