Society

Good intentions end up in the trash

By Cang Wei (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-04-27 08:28

BEIJING - More than 90 percent of Chinese citizens are aware that separating trash into different materials can lead to more recycling, according a survey conducted recently by China Youth Daily.

Even so, fewer than 20 percent said they are willing to act in accordance with that knowledge.

The Beijing-based newspaper polled 2,004 respondents, about 25 percent of whom live in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, with the rest in other Chinese cities.

According to the survey, more than 90 percent of the respondents said they approve of the policies encouraging them to separate different types of garbage and 58 percent said they are strongly supportive of such policies.

But only 18 percent have consistently abided by the policies.

In addition, although a majority of the survey respondents said they see benefits to waste classification, only 12 percent know that there is a way to do it properly.

The classification and recycling of garbage has been practiced in some Chinese cities as early as 2000, yet none of them seem to have achieved the results they had wanted.

For example, China produces 28 million tons of kitchen garbage a year, most of which is buried in landfills, according to Nie Yongfeng, a professor with Tsinghua University.

The government's poor management of waste contributes to the lackluster results, said Xie Xinyuan with the research and investigation department of Friends of Nature, a non-governmental environmental protection organization.

"The government has not thought deeply about the whole issue of waste treatment," Xie said.

"Instead of adding dust bins and garbage delivery centers, government officials should learn more from experts specializing in community work," said Xie.

An incentive system should also be built to encourage recycling, according to Xie.

"Charging people a certain fee according to the amount of waste they generate is a feasible measure," he said.

Fang Ling, a Beijing resident living in the Dongcheng district no longer puts waste into different containers.

"After I found the garbage I had carefully separated and classified had been mixed together by the garbage collectors, I stopped separating it," Fang said.

Feng Yongfeng, the founder of the Beijing-based environmental protection organization Da'erwen, told China Daily he agreed that the practices used to treat waste in China will not change without the help of the government.

"If no follow-up measures are taken, all the regulations made by the government are just for show," Feng said.

"The government needs to invest heavily in waste treatment, and more importantly, to train a large number of workers in the best ways to treat waste - how to collect it, classify it, transport it and recycle it," Feng said.