New regulations to prompt people to sort trash

Editor's Note: A draft amendment to Beijing's regulations on waste management was released online on Oct 14 soliciting public opinions until Nov 13. After Shanghai, Beijing is set to become the second city in China to make garbage sorting at source mandatory. Three experts share their views on the issue with China Daily's Yao Yuxin. Excerpts follow:

Penalties will compel people to obey rules

Beijing issued regulations on household waste management way back in 2012, years before Shanghai did so in 2019. It is on those regulations that the draft amendment is based. Like Shanghai, Beijing requires residents to sort household garbage into four categories－recyclables, hazardous waste, kitchen waste and other waste－giving the latter two types of waste more pertinent names, which Shanghai calls wet waste and dry waste.

It seems Beijing is stricter when it comes to waste classification than Shanghai, which until now has the strictest rules for garbage sorting. For instance, individuals who violate regulations in Beijing have to pay 200 yuan ($28.25), the maximum fine set for residents in Shanghai.

Yet penalty is not the purpose but a means to prompt people to obey the regulations.

China started exploring garbage classification in 2000 by earmarking eight pilot cities including Beijing and Shanghai for pilot programs.

But unlike the previous pilot program, which put more emphasis on publicity to raise people's awareness of garbage sorting, the new draft regulations do not rely on residents' voluntary behavior alone and instead make it obligatory for them to sort garbage at source by imposing penalties on violators.

As scientific waste management requires public participation and coordination between waste transporting and disposing agencies, the government should make more efforts to ensure sufficient facilities are built to ensure the system operates effectively, especially because there have been complaints that the hard work of sorting garbage goes to waste as garbage of all kinds are mixed together by trash collectors before being disposed.

The draft regulations also state that people would lose their personal credit scores if they continue to violate the garbage sorting rules. This should prompt people to exercise caution and cultivate the habit of sorting garbage at home.

As for the authorities, they should be more tolerant toward inadvertent mistakes committed by residents.

Jiang Jianguo, a professor at the School of Environment, Tsinghua University

Ultimate aim is to reduce waste

Since Shanghai became the first Chinese city to make waste sorting compulsory more than three months ago, it can offer some valuable lessons to Beijing in waste management.

First, the city has shifted focus from landfills to incinerators for waste disposal. And second, thanks to waste sorting at source, the amount of dry garbage waiting to be incinerated per day has reduced way beyond expectations.

But that the decline in the total amount of trash has been insignificant means the amount of other types of waste is still much bigger than the intended target－in fact, disposal of excessive kitchen waste is a new challenge for the city.

It is therefore important for the government to not set too high a goal given its current garbage disposal capability. Besides, in the early stage of policy implementation, it need not set a rigid standard for classifying dry and wet waste, because that could become a big burden for the people.

Besides, the authorities have to ensure that infrastructure building keeps pace with the ever-growing amount of kitchen trash.

By next year, 46 cities in China are expected to build a system for household waste management through accurate garbage sorting and disposal capability, according to a notice issued by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development at the end of 2017.

In the long term, though, the goal should be to reduce the generation of trash. In this regard, the introduction of charges based on waste generation could help motivate both individuals and enterprises to reduce waste.

Zhu Dajian, a professor at the College of Environmental Science and Engineering, Tongji University at Shanghai

Let market play a role in waste management

Since other means would not prompt households to sort garbage, the government has resorted to fines and deducting credit points to compel residents to follow waste management rules. To ensure that people sort garbage at source, the authorities, aside from imposing fines, should also make the entire trash disposal process transparent so different types of waste are not mixed together after being collected from trash cans and then sorted again later.

As for waste generation, it's unwise to blame consumers for not reducing garbage because apart from many companies using excessive packaging materials to wrap their products, many companies make poor quality products that end up in trash cans within a short time.

To make waste management sustainable, it is necessary to allow the market to play a role in the process, because companies pursuing profit would make waste disposal greatly efficient, for example, by introducing high-tech into the sector.

Therefore, the government should use the services of enterprises to efficiently dispose waste as well as minimize costs.

Since the success of trash sorting depends on the efforts of the entire society, it makes perfect sense to invite volunteers to participate and teach children the importance of sorting garbage and how to do it, so by the time they grow up they can be good at waste management.

Pan Jiahua, director of the Institute for Urban and Environmental Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

The views don't necessarily represent those of China Daily.