Do you know that West produce the highest amounts of trash in the whole world, with the United States of America sitting in the top spot? United Kingdom, France, Mexico, Italy, Russia, Germany, Spain following closely behind. Still, these countries manage to look clean. Sadly, recycling is not the reason for it. Instead, the trash is transported to developing countries for ‘recycling’.
But once in developing countries, hardly any trash is recycled, it either ends up in landfills, burned or dumped at remote areas polluting rivers, emitting toxic fumes and defiling foreign lands.
China is one dumping ground for western waste. China is responsible for taking 279 million tonnes of America’s trash annually for over 25 years now. In fact, China takes more than half of the planet’s trash for recycling.
But not anymore. China has decided to say ‘NO’ trash import. The motive behind taking up the world’s trash was to boost the manufacturing business by taking recycled raw materials from the trash. Now, with the manufacturing efficiency sky-rocketing and economy growing at a steady pace, China is focussing on their own trash bringing structured waste management into action.
The Chinese Way
China is promoting sustainable practices like the careful sorting of urban household waste, usage of recycling bins, teaching kids about waste classification from an early age so that the coming generation would be more conscious about it.
China’s Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development is developing laws on recycling of household waste. 46 major cities in China have efficient systems for sorting, collecting, treating and transporting trash.
“It’s necessary to strengthen public awareness of household trash classification,” said Yang Haiying, Deputy Director of the Ministry’s Urban Development Department. “[Attitudes] haven’t changed from ‘I’ve been told to sort’ to ‘I want to sort.’”
They are not bluffing. The ministry has announced that they aim to recycle 35% of the household waste by 2020, and that’s just two years away.
Although household waste amounts to very little part of the total waste in the country, with most of the waste is generated from farms, factories, retailers, manufacturing industries etc, the ministry is still trying to cover every corner.
Sort it Out!
The real challenge for recycling is nothing but classification and sorting. People, out of habit, dump all of their trash into the same bin. The plastic, paper and organic waste into the same garbage bag are difficult to sort.
The sanitation workers pay less attention to these details as the main motive is to remove garbage. Different types of bins are mostly absent in majority of areas, and which are there, are largely ignored.
The ragpickers are the ones to sort out the waste but that isn’t very efficient and immensely affect their health.
So Where Will the Foreign Waste Go?
That’s the million dollar question. Asia take a huge amount of world’s waste. There are still Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand which accept some of the UK’s trash. But these are small countries and only have a small fraction of the capacity compared to China, which is the world’s fourth-largest country.
But that is more of an opportunity than concern. It could be a wake-up call for West! They need to come up with solutions for treating their trash. That would also save their natural resources and more and more people would be concerned to responsibly treat their trash as it is not going anywhere anymore, well at least not to China.