Qingdao City, Shandong Province, pilots smart garbage classification facilities at Hailun Road on Dec. 14, 2017 as an effort to encourage residents to sort out kitchen waste, paper, clothes and other waste, and by doing so, residents get reward points that could be spent at designated stores.

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As the 19th National Congress report pointed out, China pursues a form of modernization characterized by harmonious coexistence between man and nature. In addition to creating more material and cultural wealth to meet people’s ever-increasing needs for a better life, we also need to provide more quality ecological goods to meet people’s ever-growing demands for a beautiful environment.

In building a beautiful China, one of the biggest problems we face today is growing urban waste—the byproduct of a growing middle class and annual double-digit economic growth over the past 10 years.

 

Urban waste challenges
China’s urban expansion has brought the trash problem close to home, showing a phenomenon of “cities besieged by waste,” posing severe challenges to urban governance. According to statistics from the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural development, China produces around 200 million tons of urban waste a year. The environmental footprint of urban waste would take hundreds of years to reverse, and the process will be complicated and costly.

In fact, China was one of the first countries in the world to propose and implement garbage classification. In 1957, Beijing put forward the concept of “classifying garbage collection in urban areas,” which marked the beginning of garbage classification in China. However, compared to developed nations and regions in the world, China still lags behind in urban waste management.

Due to the size of China’s population, residents vary in terms of cultural and educational background, income, habits and living conditions, making the comprehensive utilization of municipal solid waste a complicated, difficult and long-term task.

In addition, there is no effective platform to integrate the small-scale and scattered trash recycling entities, including the government, manufacturers, consumers and recycling firms, resulting in an information asymmetry between waste producers and collectors.

At the government level, existing policies, regulations and supervision can somewhat shape the behaviors of manufacturers, distributors and other collective waste producers, but these measures are mostly ineffective in encouraging residents to sort out their household waste.

 

Three-dimensional approach
To this end, we propose a three-dimensional approach that integrates technology, institutions and culture to realize the comprehensive utilization of urban household waste.

First, we need an integrative perspective that stresses the harmonious coexistence of human life, production and ecology. Any excess production, medical care, nutrition and luxurious lifestyle should be avoided to reduce emission and restore the balance of man and nature.

Next, we need to promote a correct set of values on environment, consumption, wealth and happiness among the public. According to the notice released by the educational departments on Feb. 11 this year, schools are urged to help every student understand the necessity of garbage classification by the end of 2020 while gradually establishing the long-term mechanism of cultivating students’ environmental protection awareness. In practice, according to different age groups’ cognitive capacity and growth pattern, the knowledge of the household waste classification shall be organically imbedded into teaching materials.

At the same time, we need to cultivate an awareness of environmental protection among the general public by highlighting cases where people—be they governmental officials, business owners or individuals—responsible for environmental pollution are punished in the mass media. Needless to say, the human race needs to strengthen a sense of awe toward nature in today’s world. 

Finally, talent, technology, capital, institutions and culture should work together in order to resolve the issue of urban waste, which involves people from all walks of life.

Concrete steps
Based on the three-dimensional analysis, we propose the integration of technology, culture and institutional arrangements to thoroughly tackle the mounting problem of urban waste.

To be specific, we could rely on the internet, big data, artificial intelligence and other technologies to realize the whole-process measurement, supervision and traceability of urban waste. In fact, the application of these new tools has become a new trend in waste management. For example, Beijing launched a campaign of sending smart recycling machines to the community in 2016. In the selected communities, each household receives a QR code with a green sticker representing other waste as well as a red one for kitchen waste. Each time a person disposes of a garbage bag with a QR code and puts it in the designated bins, he or she would get reward points based on the weight of the trash.

More importantly, the application of information technology could help form garbage collection big data, covering spatial, time and behavioral information. Spatial information is collected by smart recycling ends directly, which can detail the kinds of waste in different urban regions, mapping out a “garbage density graphic” similar to that of population density, so as to provide reference for garbage collection vehicles, routes and locations of recycling centers.

Time information can also be collected through smart recycling, which can shed some light on the time pattern of different kinds of garbage in urban regions to help achieve reasonable distribution of the corresponding garbage collection workload.

Behavioral information is a description of residents’ past behavior, taking the form of questionnaires and self-assessments. Though due to social credit effect, mostly people tend to pick more “noble” options, posing threat to the authenticity of the survey data. Recycling ends can reflect the actual garbage-sorting behavior of residents. When cross-referenced with the APP registration data, the relationship between garbage classification behavior and people’s incomes, educational backgrounds and professions is thus revealed. Ultimately, all these efforts would contribute to the comprehensive utilization of municipal solid waste.

  At the institutional level, it is necessary to establish a complete management system to supervise garbage disposal while stressing the role of morality and social norms in shaping people’s behaviors. Municipal solid waste includes not only household garbage, but also waste materials, electronic waste, construction waste, hazardous waste and medical waste. Currently, different government bodies are responsible for the management of different kinds of waste, creating problems for comprehensive utilization.

Currently, the urban waste management services generally collect unsorted municipal solid waste to be disposed of in landfills or waste incinerators around the periphery of the city or further out into the countryside. Even if separate bins are available for recyclable and non-recyclable waste, government waste services do not have the capacity to operate a recycling system, so the separated waste is bundled together into one truck all the same. Therefore, the composition and quantity of urban waste creates many problems for landfills and waste incineration.

In this light, the urban waste services should take advantage of modern technology to establish unified and centralized management and run an effective recycling system, which is imperative for the governance of urban waste under the circumstances.

At the root, though, society as a whole needs to improve the recognition of garbage classification culture. With or without supervision, only when people take the initiative to participate in garbage classification can the goal of zero household waste be accomplished someday.

In particular, the integration of technology, culture and institutional arrangements should also place the comprehensive utilization of urban waste under the umbrella of smart city construction, while establishing a linkage with rural waste, land pollution and agricultural environmental protection, to ensure green mountains and blue rivers. We should make full use of the wisdom of human beings, especially to explore the essence of Chinese culture, to make garbage disposal capacity match the size of the city and the scale of urbanization.

In sum, by adopting a more socially just, circular economy, and resource utilization approach toward urban waste management, Chinese cities can reduce their per capita environmental footprint, which is a critical step toward minimizing the environmental impact of urbanization and eventually building a beautiful China.

 

Ge Xinquan is a professor from the School of Economics and Management at Beijing Information Science and Technology University.

(edited by YANG XUE)