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Working to reduce mountains of trash
HANGZHOU continues to work on a smelly issue — garbage. The amount of rubbish is rising at an “alarming rate” and the city’s main landfill will likely be completely full in five years. Thus the city government is looking at various options including increasing recycling efforts, converting kitchen waste into biogas and raising disposal fees in an effort to raise awareness about the need to cut down on garbage.
Earlier this month, the city government set a garbage sorting target of 95 percent in urban districts and reducing daily rubbish with a three-year initiative.
“Hangzhou produced 8,400 tons of domestic waste every day on average last year. The amount has topped 10,000 tons since April. The growth rate is alarming,” Hangzhou Party Secretary Gong Zheng said at the time. “Our earlier efforts of building more waste treatment facilities would be useless if we don’t carry on.”
On August 6, the government launched a regulation stipulating that from January 1, 2015, every district will have a garbage limit. Once the limit is exceeded, each district government will have to pay a higher disposal fee. The news spread quickly with many residents strongly opposed to the idea since they believed the extra fee would be passed on to them. The Hangzhou Urban Management Commission later clarified that the fee would be covered by each district’s budget, not individuals.
However, the government is considering raising the household garbage disposal fee. The annual garbage disposal fee for a household is 20 yuan, which has not changed in nearly 20 years. The cost of disposing garbage produced by a family of three is about 130 yuan every year. The government covers the gap.
The commission said they could also change the way the garbage disposal fee is collected after looking at Taiwan’s model.
In Taiwan, the garbage disposal fee is added into the price of garbage bags, making it a hidden tax. Buying these garbage bags means a person is paying their share of the garbage disposal fee.
In Hangzhou, only 50 percent of homes pay the garbage disposal fee since there is a lack of legislation to punish those who don’t comply.
To reduce garbage, the government also plans to ban plastic bags in wet markets, supermarkets and wholesale markets. It also plans to establish waste treatment facilities at large restaurants, school cafeterias and hospitals in the next three years.
The government has set a target of disposing 10,000 tons of garbage every day by 2017, including incinerating 8,500 tons of trash and transforming more than 400 tons of kitchen garbage into biogas.
With this objective, sorting garbage thoroughly is a priority. Tianziling Landfill — Hangzhou’s largest dump — will be completely full in five years and the plan to build a waste incinerator in Jiufeng, Yuhang District, has encountered fierce opposition.
Hangzhou began garbage sorting in 2010. An earlier initiative from 2011 to 2013 introduced the practice of garbage sorting to nearly 700,000 homes.
According to China News Agency, the city government has already invested around 200 million yuan (US$32.5 million) on garbage sorting in more than 1,000 residential communities in the past three years.
It spent 82 million yuan on dustbins, garbage bags and garbage collecting stations in residential communities. Meanwhile, another 49 million yuan was used to advertise the benefits of trash sorting. Another 22 million yuan was used to train community commission staff how to sort rubbish.
Despite some progress, the overall result hasn’t made a big enough dent in the problem.
As part of the sorting campaign, free garbage bags are distributed to participating communities, but few residents take the time to pick them up.
Zhang Shukong of the Hangzhou Solid Waste Environment Research Center told China News Agency: “If people could realize this is a big issue and everyone needs to do their part, much of the government’s expenditure could be saved.”
Other efforts to sort trash include special garbage trucks. The Hangzhou Environment Group, responsible for collecting all trash in the downtown area, uses the trucks to further sort rubbish.
“We dispatch these special trucks to communities that have already begun garbage sorting work,” the group’s Sun Xuankan told Shanghai Daily.
“We collect the trash according to different waste classifications. In October, 100 new trucks will join the fleet and help alleviate the burden of transporting all the rubbish.”
In June, the group said it launched the Kitchen Garbage Separation and Reduction Project.
They use a biological process to transform kitchen waste into biogas, which is expected to generate more than 100 million kilowatt hours of electricity annually. The project is the largest of its kind in the country.
“Kitchen waste accounts for more than 55 percent of all garbage collected,” Sun said. “Burning it isn’t a good option nor is dumping it at the landfill. This biogas project is the best way to dispose of kitchen waste since it eliminates one bad thing while creating something good.”
Thus far, 200 tons of kitchen garbage can be processed every day, half of the city’s total. Sun added that they plan to expand the project.
Another government initiative is an incentive program. Intelligent waste recycling machines have been placed at Zhaohui residential block to encourage garbage sorting. Residents amass credit, which can be redeemed for prizes, for sorting rubbish into different categories before disposing of it in their communities.
The machine registers the type of garbage and dispenses printed bar codes to stick on the trash bags. When workers scan the bar codes, points are added to an individual’s account. Wu Ziyi, a postgraduate student at China Academy of Art, sorted so much trash that he accumulated more than 1 million points and won the use of a vehicle for five years.
Another way to reduce garbage is the used of used clothing bins.
The Liushui, Xiandai and Datieguan communities, used clothing bins provide residents with an environmentally friendly way to dispose of old clothes. The clothes can then be given to the poor or communities hit by a natural disaster. Used clothing can also be made into mops, reusable bags, leather products and other articles. In the past, most people just tossed out old clothes.
Xiaoying Lane Community is testing another option.
The community has no trash bins as garbage collectors come at a fixed time every day. Residents have to sort garbage and throw it out when the collectors come. After three years, the community’s garbage sorting rate has reached 80 percent.
This method will be expanded to other communities.
Party secretary Zhang said, “While garbage sorting has improved in three years, there is still much work to be done.”
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