Nanjing’s Gulou District, where Guangzhou Lu meets Ninghai Lu, has received a shiny new push in the way of recycling awareness.
Five brand-new recycling bins have just been installed at the junction when they were spotted by The Nanjinger. With foam wrapping still on the ground, we discovered these are the first installations of such bins in the city.
“Only here, only in Gulou district for now”, a workman informed us. The bins come in five colour shades and are separated into newspaper and magazines, carton packaging, cans, plastic beverage bottles and other waste.
These bins have made their way to Nanjing following the those of similar types in other cities earlier in the year, and they fall in line with the governments recent campaign to stop the large flow of yang laji or “foreign garbage” into China.
As the world’s biggest importer of rubbish, according to the South China Morning Post, in 2016, China imported 7.3 million tonnes of waste plastics. And as reported by the Economist, China imported half the world’s exports of scrap copper and waste paper in 2016 and half of its used plastic, spending over $18 billion on imports of rubbish.
At the beginning of 2017, the Chinese government told the WTO that it would no longer allow imports of rubbish from 24 categories of solid waste and plans to have this ban effective by the end of the year.
One of the officials in charge of the International Cooperation of the Environmental Protection Committee, Guo Jian, said at a conference which was held to announce the governments decision, “The problem of foreign garbage is loathed by everyone in China”. And it was reported, Jiang Jianguo, professor of environment at Tsinghua University, said that, “Some private companies take away the reusable parts after smuggling, but don’t deal with the rest properly, which could lead to direct pollution to the environment”.
Not only is China the largest importer of waste from around the world, but as reported in the Trash Planet series, China produces “220 million tons of municipal waste annually, and due to the country’s rapid population growth and waste management structures, the amount is projected to reach a shocking 533 million tons by the year 2030, according to the World Bank”.
China’s “no” to trash imports has come as a shock to companies such as California-based Chung Nam; a supplier that last year alone exported 333,900 containers, and almost all of them came to China.
As the importing of foreign garbage begins to slow and China turns inward, the focus that this will have on community efforts is said to help boost domestic plastic recycling. So we can expect a lot more shiny new bins popping up around the city as Nanjinger’s are set to receive the 101 on household recycling.
