Rethinking recycling

In a couple of months, when Beijing residents ride the subway, they will be able to recycle and get paid for it.

That's what Beijing Incom Resources Recovery Recycling Company has in mind. For over a year, the company has been dedicated to designing a machine that will take plastic bottles, then automatically crush and store them for further recycling purposes.

Incom hopes to begin gradually installing these machines in subway stations by the end of this year, which would result in revolutionary changes for the local recycling industry.

The recycling industry in China is in an awkward situation. On one hand, companies like Incom are not getting much government support for innovation leading to new technologies geared toward recycling resources. On the other hand, many recycling services operated by private citizens are being shut down because of environmental damage.

New technology in town

On the outside, Incom's recycling machine looks just like a vending machine or an arcade game. It's as tall as a grown man and has a big screen on the front. There are three buttons under the screen, and a hole on the left.

Feng Juan, a marketing expert with Incom, picked up an empty bottle and inserted it into the hole. The machine responded with a crushing sound and an information bar popped up on the screen.

"You have inserted one bottle," it read.

The buttons under the screen allow you to choose whether to donate the bottle or not. If you would like compensation, you can just press your metro card on the censor and receive a credit of 0.1 yuan (1.5 US cents). Then the machine will offer to print out a receipt that tells you how many bottles you've recycled so far.

Once the machine is full, workers from Incom will come to collect the bottles and bring them back to the company's factory in Shunyi district, where the material will be cleaned and made into new bottles.

The machine is also intelligent enough to know empty bottles from cigarette cartons, apple cores and other trash, Feng told Metro Beijing. When the bottle is inserted, the machine scans the label for a bar code. If nothing is detected, the machine will spit it back out.

Furthermore, the machine is connected to the company's information center via the Internet. It is programmed to send a signal to the center when it's full, has a malfunction, or is low on ink, Feng said.

Information on the bottles will also be sent to the center, so that the company can gather data on what kinds of bottles are recycled, Chang Tao, Incom's general manager, told Metro Beijing.

Chang said he hopes the data the machine collects will serve as a basis for the government to introduce new policies that help companies in the recycling business.

"Eighteen countries use this recycling technology… and recycling machines are very common too, in almost all developed countries," Chang noted. "But they have had a different starting point for recycling abroad… it's hard to find a commercial model that is suitable for China."

Living in garbage

The recycling model in developed countries revolves around government management, Chang said. Usually the government designates a certain company to collect trash from the public, then separate and recycle it accordingly.

But in China, individual trash collectors go into every residential compound to collect trash from public bins. They sell it to individual recycling centers, who then sell the recyclables to an operation that processes the materials into new products.

Today, a whole grass-roots chain of activity is being carried out by private hands under China's current recycling practices.

Fan Pengzhi, 22, works at one such private recycling center in Dongxiaokou, Changping district. His job entails separating piles of plastic waste into more than 20 categories. His boss, surnamed Li, then sells the sorted trash to processing plants that turn the containers into different products, like bottles, appliance frames, basins, and baskets.

Fan thinks workers in the waste management industry are doing Beijing residents a favor.

"If all of us went on a strike, Beijing would be piled high with trash within three months," he said.

However, the government doesn't share this view. The Commission of Commerce of Changping district is determined to crack down on such centers. An office chief from the commission, who refused to be named, told Metro Beijing these centers are unauthorized companies that produce safety hazards. This is why, he said, they have to be shut down and the workers evicted.

According to Fan, another reason the commission has given is that these businesses hurt the environment.

"Some places often wash off the oil on the plastic with caustic liquids or laundry detergent. These chemicals seep into the ground and pollute water resources," Fan said. "Go to Lishui bridge. Go see the river there. What color is it? It's all been polluted."

Fan believes that some individuals are irresponsible because they are profit-driven, but he said that even so, someone needs to do the job.

"If I don't go to hell, then who will?" he laughed.

Fan asserted that there will always be room for the recycling business. His boss, Li, nodded in agreement. If they are evicted from their garage in Dongxiaokou, they'll just move to another place and start over.

Calls for smart policies

The city needs recycling services, and needs people to take care of its trash. Big companies capable of handling the trash professionally, such as Incom, are struggling to cover the high cost of this business alone. Individual recycling centers that endanger the environment are being eliminated by the government, but there is nothing to replace them.

The core of the recycling dilemma in China is the lack of government regulations, Chen Liwen, a researcher at Nature University, a Beijing-based NGO-funded program that teaches environmental science, told Metro Beijing.

Chen believes independent recycling centers play an essential, transitional role in the recycling chain. They collect small amounts of trash, sort them, then sell them to bigger processors to be made into new products.

The current state of the industry has its benefits, he said. "If the trash is not recycled, then it's either put into landfills or burned."

But the problem is obvious: Because of high rent, the recycling business isn't very profitable. This may be what prompts some centers to use harmful detergents to clean out plastic bottles, or simply not recycle certain items at all.

Simply shutting down these centers won't solve the problem, Chen said. They exist because they are necessary. In his view, the government needs to support the industry and set guidelines, such as what type of detergent to use.

Big companies like Incom need such support as well. Chang said most recycling companies do not break even. If the government were to subsidize them a little, or charge pollution taxes to some companies, it would help a great deal.

Chang wants the government to support recycling systems by collecting the bottles straight from the public and not letting them get into trash collectors' hands.

But as of now, no policy is in place. The office chief from the Commission of Commerce of Changping district said all of China lacks regulations on the recycling industry.

"Changping district, for example, has some state-owned recycling centers, but because there are no real regulations or standards, they are not used very much," he said.

Chang said that eliminating individual recycling centers is the first step. The next one is to establish a comprehensive system. But, he cautioned, the government needs to take it slow and make sure everything properly falls into place.