Beijing garbage sorters live life on the edge

(Ecns.cn) – During this year's "two sessions" a proposal to address the absence of policies concerning the recycling industry has given hope to urban garbage sorters, but will it solve the chaotic situation that has plagued China's sustainable development for decades?

Wan Jie, a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), submitted the proposal in an effort to urge the government to formulate policies that would help garbage recyclers on the frontline. Such workers make their living by providing an essential service – sifting through trash and getting it ready to recycle – yet they are often misunderstood by society and forced to relocate by the government.

Their bitterness can be seen in the piles of trash towering over the brick and tin shacks in the hardscrabble neighborhood of Dongxiaokou, located in Beijing's Changping District. The largest transfer station for recycling in the city, it covers an area of 560 mu (37.3 hectares) and is home to thousands of scrap businesses and over 30,000 people, according to China Newsweek.

Life of a nomad

In November 2011, a final decision was made that Dongxiaokou Village would be relocated to make way for urban expansion, which meant that within months the massive "scrap town" would be gone.

Xu Fusheng, a commercial tenant there, is now worried about his future. Although he has paid three months in rent, the wire connecting his telephone has been cut and he has no access to the Internet.

Xu says many of the village tenants came from his hometown in Henan Province, and they are all now looking for places to relocate in outlying suburbs.

According to China Newsweek, names such as "Dongxiaokou Transfer Station for Scrap Recycling" and "Dongxiaokou Recycling Center" have never appeared in any official document, ample evidence of the degree to which the center has been undervalued in the capital's waste processing chain.

But in this trash recycling village, a shop is also a home, and one is usually separated from the other only by a wire fence or a plastic-piled wall. These shanty-like structures contain every scrap left over from modern life, including mobile phones, household appliances, furniture, clothing, wood, used foam, paper and plastic bottles, all of it well sorted.

Xu says he has been in the business since the early 1990s: he came to Beijing as a teenager with only 300 yuan and began working as an assistant garbage sorter, where he found that the dividends from recycling were nearly instantaneous.

Twenty years later, Xu is the boss of a recycling shop that employs up to ten sorters. Though he is experienced in the business, Xu says life has not been easy, mostly because they can never settle down.

Around 1995, Beijing's largest recycling center was located near the Wohu Qiao (Bridge) in Haidian District, where Xu made his living collecting trash with a tricycle. However, the station was soon demolished, and Xu was forced to move to Chaoyang Wali, where the Olympic Park is now located.

In 2002, Chaoyang Wali was chosen to pilot a project to turn rural residents into urban residents, and the recycling center had to move further north. After several years, when the construction of Subway Line 5 kicked off, Xu moved once again to Dongxiaokou.

This is a typical experience for garbage sorters in Beijing, Xu says. As he describes it, they must endure the plight of the nomad, frequently moving from one place to another.

Hard times and no respect

In 2010, it was reported that Beijing generated 18,000 tons of waste a day, but the daily capacity to process it all was far from sufficient. This year, that figure may hit 25,000 tons, according to a recent survey conducted by an environmental technologies corporation.

In the 1950s, Beijing established a special recycling system for trash which came under the management of the resource recycling department. After the 1980s, however, the state-run recycling system gradually became privately owned, and migrant workers formed a large fleet of garbage sorters.

According to a report on garbage sorters released by the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences in 2006, there were about 300,000 individuals engaged in garbage recycling in Beijing, including both sorters and businessmen higher up the chain. All told, the industry brought in about 3 billion yuan every year, the report said.

Dong Jinshi, environmentalist and deputy secretary of the Beijing Society for Environmental Science, told China Newsweek that there were 130,000 genuine garbage sorters a decade ago, and the number has grown to at least 150,000 by today, with even more people doing other types of work in the recycling industry.

But although garbage sorters contribute greatly to the city's development, they receive little respect from society, and continue to labor under uncertain conditions and a lack of official protection.

More efforts needed

On March 2, 2012, China's industrial authority released a plan to recycle 7 billion tons of industrial solid waste during the period from 2011-2015 in an effort to ease environmental deterioration.

China's central government offices have been urged this year to take a lead in the country's overall waste sorting and recycling effort by recycling as much as 80 percent of recyclable waste, reported China Daily.

According to Wan Jie, the waste recycling industry is an essential industry for a country, because it is vital to an ecologically-friendly economy and can resolve the conflict between economic development and environmental protection.

The government should build a new recycling center to cope with the garbage problems rather than relocate the Dongxiaokou transfer station. If a full chain can be established, from garbage collecting to sorting, storing, delivering and processing, the industry will function more effectively, he added.

Meanwhile, garbage sorters deserve more respect, and the government should teach the general public more about them and create a better understanding of their contributions, said Wan.