An Old Story of Environment and Sanitation: How Scavengers Prop Up China's Recycling Chain

Public education on waste sorting in China is still nowhere near enough. These "scavengers" have become the real experts in sorting waste.

In 2017, Beijing produced about 9 million tons of household waste, an average of 25,000 tons a day. That figure is still climbing fast, by 8% to 10% a year, and disposing of it is one of the biggest problems the city's managers face.

But strictly speaking, not all of those 9 million tons are "waste." A fair share of it is scrap worth money — "recyclables," material with value still in it. Chen Liwen holds a master's degree in environmental history from the University of Southern California, has spent years studying China's waste-recycling system, and founded the environmental NGO Zero Waste Villages. By her estimate, recyclables make up about 30% of China's urban waste, and nearly 90% of that gets recovered. In California, a state ahead of the rest of the US on both environmental thinking and policy, the rate is only about 35%.

The credit for that, she says, goes to the huge, efficient "informal recycling system" of scavengers and traders in Chinese cities.

Benjamin Steuer, a scholar at the University of Vienna who has studied China's recycling business since 2013, found that in Beijing this "informal sector" recovers more than 90% of household recyclables, which amounts to 74% of all the recyclable material in the city. It also recovers 60% to 80% of China's electronic waste and supplies 90% of the raw material used by licensed e-waste dismantling and recycling firms — propping up that entire formal industry.

Steuer found that the sector saves the government enormous sums: 400 million yuan in 2010, rising to 800 million yuan in 2014. And that counts only waste-disposal costs. Add in the pollution avoided and the energy saved, and the figure goes higher.

This sector — no official headcount, no budget, no business licenses — together with the government's own sanitation service, forms one of the two pillars that keep the city clean. But since 2012 the informal pillar has been shrinking, squeezed by urban redevelopment, population controls and markets far outside the city. By Steuer's count, informal recycling in Beijing employed 300,000 people at its peak in 2011; by 2013 the number had dropped to between 150,000 and 170,000. Chen Liwen's fieldwork found that by 2016, about half of Beijing's cart-pushing recyclers had left the trade.

As they left, the volume of waste the sanitation department had to haul and treat kept rising. One figure Chen obtained from Beijing's sanitation department: in 2017 the city's waste showed an "abnormal growth rate" of 3%. That extra waste had no basis in population or economic growth. It was mostly scrap that nobody was collecting anymore. And the range of materials still being collected was narrowing too.

When millions of tons of recyclable material go uncollected each year and enter the city's waste system instead, they are buried, burned, or mistakenly dumped at food-waste composting sites, where they become a new environmental problem. They also lose their chance to become recycled material, which makes the "circular economy" the state keeps promoting — waste that is reduced, reused, and turned back into resources — impossible to talk about.

In July 2017, the Chinese government announced it would gradually cut the categories and quantities of solid waste it imports, the material commonly called "foreign garbage." For the recycling industry this could be a crisis or an opening. Get collection right at the front end now, and the domestic recycled-materials chain might finally join up. Get it wrong, and China's ability to handle its own scrap becomes a real problem. Vast quantities of usable material would go back to being nothing but trash.

Before the consequences, though, look at how this "informal recycling system" actually works, and at the lives of the people inside it.

An Industry With Nowhere Left to Retreat

It was past 9pm when He Xingyuan, who collects scrap on a tricycle cart, got back to his home with his wife, parked the cart and started making dinner. Home is a lean-to in the village, thrown together out of asbestos sheeting and metal panels: 10 square meters, 600 yuan a month. In winter the walls ice over, "all shiny."

After the Daxing fire last November, the couple were "cleared out" of a basement in a residential compound in Dingfuzhuang, just outside Beijing's East Fifth Ring Road, and moved to the village across the road. Their shack sits right behind their landlord's house. But now even the single-story houses the landlords live in are being torn down in bulk as "illegal structures," and He Xingyuan and his wife have no idea how much longer they can stay.

"A lot of people have gone, because of housing. Especially whole families — with kids, sometimes two of them — they can't find a place, so they just leave on their own. You can tell from the carts hauling scrap on the street: way fewer now," He Xingyuan said.

Li Jianjun stayed too, but his trouble is a different one. When we met he was selling scrap at the Chaoyang Circular Economy Industrial Park, but he lives in Tongzhou. The single-story house he used to rent in Chaoyang was demolished at the end of 2017, he said, and with nothing to rent nearby he moved out to Tongzhou. His rent doubled, and he now lives more than ten kilometers from the Chaoyang compounds where most of his regular customers are, so a large part of every day goes to riding his tricycle back and forth.

Even those lucky enough to keep their housing found the demolition campaign cutting off their supply. Wu Dongjin and his son rent a single-story house in the Dingfuzhuang West Street community outside the East Fifth Ring Road, with a paper sign reading "We Buy Scrap" hung out front; they have dug in there and buy at a fixed spot. The area has plenty of shops and an old residential compound, and when business was good they could fill a 2- to 3-ton light truck in a single day. But from March or April last year, chengguan — urban management officers — started coming by often, telling them not to go out collecting and not to pile scrap in front of the shop. In August a "comprehensive environmental cleanup" began on the surrounding streets. By November the compound had started clearing out illegal structures, and many tenants renting subdivided rooms moved away. Now father and son take two or three days to fill one truck and earn a few hundred yuan, far less than before.

Wang Chao, from Henan, has been in the trade for ten years. For the past few he has run two small sorting centers for recyclable material, one in Haidian and one in Changping, buying discarded polyethylene film from scavengers and traders like He Xingyuan, Li Jianjun and Wu Dongjin within a ten-kilometer radius. He told QDaily that after the 19th Party Congress only twenty or thirty scrap markets were left in all of Beijing. A year before the Congress, more than 100 people had been supplying his Changping center; by the time it was about to open, nearly all of them had gone back to their home provinces. This year, word spread that population controls had eased a little and some came back, but only about 30 people supply him now.

The plight of these informal recyclers who have barely hung on in Beijing is only the latest shock the trade has taken since the end of 2017. Its troubles go back much further, and many more people had already left long before then.

Chen Liwen once traced the shape of this industry, and its rise and fall over the years, in an article called Whither Waste Recycling.

Since the 1990s, migrant workers from Henan, Hebei, Sichuan and elsewhere have gradually displaced the state materials-recovery system — the network of "waste collection stations" built by the national Supply and Marketing Cooperatives — to become the backbone of the trade.

At the top of the chain are the people who walk the residential compounds picking recyclables out of the trash, known as "scavengers," and the people who ride tricycles or drive trucks, buying scrap from residents and scavengers, known as "roving traders."

Below them are "stall traders" like Wang Chao. They used to cluster in the more than 200 scrap markets in Beijing's urban villages. The larger markets — Dongxiaokou and Dongsanqi in Changping, in their day — held hundreds of stalls. A stall usually took up one or two single-story rooms, used both for the business and as the trader's family home. Each stall was highly specialized, buying one category only: metal, appliances, plastic, textiles, paper, glass. Even plastic broke down further. After buying, stall traders sorted the material again and baled it for sale to recycling companies downstream, which turned it into recycled material.

But over the years, through one round of municipal clearance after another, the markets fell back and back. In the 1980s they sat around the Third Ring Road; in the 1990s they moved out between the Third and Fourth; after 2000 they were already between the Fifth and Sixth. After that there was nowhere left to retreat to. In 2012 the city began demolishing its 200-odd markets in bulk, and by 2016 almost none were left. Beyond the demolitions, in 2014 scrap recycling and wholesaling were written into Beijing's Catalogue of Prohibited and Restricted New Industries, banned from new construction or expansion. Once the old markets came down, no new ones could take their place.

Every market leveled sent another group of people away. By Chen Liwen's count, after 2016 nearly half the tricycle recyclers in urban Beijing left the trade, and about 20% of stall traders switched into other service work or left the city altogether.

The 19th Party Congress in 2017 and the evictions that followed the November 18 Daxing fire squeezed their room to live still further, and produced the situation He Xingyuan and his wife, Wu Dongjin and his son, Li Jianjun and Wang Chao are in today.

The City Isn't the Only Thing Pushing Them Out

The shrinking of this informal sector isn't only the city rejecting it. Things happening outside the city, further down the chain, have hit it just as hard.

Chen Liwen told QDaily that most of Beijing's waste plastic, paper, metal, glass and textiles go to neighboring Hebei and Shandong for processing. Plastic in particular has been handled since the 1980s mainly by family workshops in those two provinces, rural operations that pollute water, air and soil as they work. In July 2011 the government shut down the entire hard-plastic sorting and washing business in Wen'an, Langfang — the largest plastic-recycling base in northern China — over pollution, keeping only some of the pelletizing workshops. Amid the wider environmental crackdown, local governments everywhere have protected themselves, unwilling to spend their own environment processing other places' waste, and have gone on closing these small operations year after year. The workforce in the sector has fallen by 80%.

What's missing, Chen Liwen believes, is a view of the whole. Making recycled material pollutes far less than making virgin material; the point is to control the pollution, not to close the plants. There should be regional planning: if Beijing can't do this work, then how does Hebei get compensated for doing it?

The contraction downstream drove scrap prices down hard. When the waste-plastic industry in Wen'an was shut in 2011, the price of polypropylene and polyethylene in Beijing fell straight from 3 yuan to under 1 yuan.

The wider market has been brutal too. The 2008 financial crisis knocked down prices for every kind of scrap, and many have never come back. Mixed plastic went from more than 3 yuan before the crisis to about 1 yuan in 2016. Because recycled plastic tracks the price of virgin plastic, the fall in international crude oil prices two years ago pushed waste plastic down further still.

The slowdown in China's overall growth has hurt both the recycled-materials business and the scrap trade. Between 2015 and 2016, the prices of recycled copper, aluminum and iron fell 16%, 26% and 44%. In interviews Steuer did with recyclers in 2016, he learned that after 2014 only paper and cardboard held their prices; every other category fell.

And into this market, which has yet to recover, came another policy that could bring the whole domestic recycling chain down: the halt on imports of "foreign garbage."

Last July the Chinese government announced that from the end of the year it would gradually cut the categories and volume of solid waste it imports. To most of the media and the public this felt like vindication — China was finally refusing to carry the environmental cost for other countries. But for the large licensed recycled-materials companies it was a crisis, because "foreign garbage" had long been an important raw material. A high share of it comes from commercial and industrial sources and isn't mixed with organic waste, and even its household portion is less often contaminated with organics, which makes it cleaner and easier to process.

Some of those companies have started looking at the domestic scrap market instead. Wang Chao, the stall trader, told QDaily that in the year or so since the policy took effect, licensed recycling firms have grown more willing to buy from him, and prices have risen a little.

But Chen Liwen told QDaily that with recyclable raw material shrinking both at home and abroad, more companies are moving to Southeast Asia. Losing the processing capacity downstream will bring down the collectors upstream, and in the end drain China's ability to handle its own scrap. At that point China's recyclable material will have to be treated as garbage.

Attempts at "Formalization" Have Never Worked

Few people doubt that the scrap trade is worth something, environmentally and economically. What people disagree on is who should do the collecting, and how. The idea of formalizing the industry, modernizing it, giving it an "industrial upgrade," has never gone away — and has never worked.

Joshua Goldstein, Chen Liwen's advisor in USC's environmental history program, has studied China's waste-recycling system since 1996. He found that around 2000 the Chinese government wanted to build a state collection system to replace the scavenger system that had already formed. But as urban waste grew quickly, and after the custody-and-repatriation system was abolished in 2003, the scavenger-based system became more efficient and more complete, and the government, counting the cost, let the model stand.

In 2008 the Ministry of Commerce began trying to set up designated collection companies and build collection networks region by region. The slogan was "standardize the front end, organize the logistics, professionalize the sorting, ship straight to the factories." But people in the trade say building it was one thing: once built, the supporting facilities, the management and the policy were all missing, so the system did almost nothing.

Speaking at a lecture in Beijing this March, Goldstein said that in more than 20 years of research he has never found a single government statistic on the informal recycling trade. The agencies in charge have no basic grasp of it, so their policies float free of reality.

Last December, Beijing Television ran a news item announcing that the "dirty, messy and shabby" scrap peddlers in residential compounds would at last be replaced by professional resource-recovery companies. On screen, young collectors in uniform took bookings from residents through a phone app and paid them by WeChat transfer. The voiceover was emphatic: the community would never again be spoiled by "dirty, messy and shabby" peddlers...

"They're extremely orderly. It's people who don't understand them who call them dirty and messy," Chen Liwen said. She calls scrap recycling "a labor-intensive skilled trade," because the material comes in such variety — hard plastic alone has dozens of different compositions — and recycling depends on sorting all of it precisely. That is the informal sector's greatest strength.

Part of the reason they look "dirty, messy and shabby," she adds, is exactly that their sites are never secure, so nobody can put in the fixed investment that would make things tidy.

Wang Chao's view is that having companies do the collecting costs so much it can't last. In a trade with thin margins all round, he says, if collection still makes any money at all it is because "one person is made to do the work of three."

There has also been an attempt to "modernize" the trade by riding the "Internet Plus" wave.

R³ is a Beijing social enterprise that promotes recycling. Its founder, Zhang Miao, has studied the various scrap-collection apps that appeared in recent years. One kind lets users book an individual collector by phone: apps like Uncle Scrap, Recycling Bro, Pick It Up and Sell It, and Help at Home. But these apps hold little appeal for individual collectors and little sway over them, because the trade runs on territory, and an app does little for a collector's income. On top of that, the policy environment has driven very high turnover.

Another kind hires collectors directly as staff. The best known was Zaishenghuo ("Renewed Life"), whose business was concentrated in Beijing. It launched in September 2014, raised several rounds of financing in the tens of millions of yuan, and by the end of 2016 had 250,000 registered users across 1,000 Beijing compounds and 20,000 daily active users. It stopped operating in October 2017. Zhang Miao thinks it failed partly because door-to-door collection costs too much in labor, and partly because it expanded too fast.

The relatively more successful ventures, such as Green Earth, depend on the government buying their services to cover operating and equipment costs, and win regional monopolies through government backing. A few others serve only companies and schools, where volume is concentrated; some of those collect nothing but paper.

Waste Sorting Is Far From Mature, and Landfill and Incineration Each Have Their Flaws

If a city had a working waste-sorting system, the scrap trade might not be indispensable. In fact the government has been pushing "integration of the two networks," the urban sanitation system and the recycled-materials system, hoping that sorting will cut waste volumes and turn waste back into resources. But sorting here is nowhere near developed, and the community sorting programs already running usually stop dead at the transfer station.

In 2009 Beijing issued its Opinions on Comprehensively Advancing Household Waste Treatment and built a batch of incineration and composting plants. In 2010 it launched a program certifying model "waste-sorting-compliant" residential compounds, trying to separate out food waste so that incineration would work better.

But when Chen Liwen visited the Datun transfer station near the Olympic Village in 2010, she found that waste collected separately in the city center was being mixed back together there, then trucked more than 20 kilometers north to the Asuwei integrated waste treatment center. Part of it went to a newly built composting plant, was screened mechanically again, and fermented into compost as "food waste." Every time she went to look at that composting project, the "fertilizer" coming out of it was mixed with large amounts of plastic and other trash. The composting plant at Nangong in Daxing District was the same.

In early June this year Chen Liwen went back to Asuwei. The waste piles were higher, the landfill area bigger, an incinerator burning 3,000 tons a day had been built, and a disposal area for ash and slag had been opened up. Of improvement in waste sorting there was no sign. Chen calls this kind of urban sorting "plugging your own ears to steal a bell" — self-deception, nothing more.

In an article about that visit she wrote: "If we put the investment and the effort that goes into building incinerators into rebuilding the sorted collection and treatment system we already have, we might get twice the result for half the work."

With no efficient collection system and no mature sorting, enormous quantities of recyclable material can only go where everything else goes: to the landfill or the incinerator. Both come with pollution problems of their own.

Take landfill. In Anhui province, a research report called Huishang ("Anhui's Grief") from the environmental NGO Wuhu Ecology Center found that the great majority of landfills it surveyed not only failed to meet standards for treating leachate but were leaking it into surrounding farmland and groundwater. Some discharged it straight into the Huai River through the municipal pipes. Some landfills are run so loosely that they are a public-health hazard: sheep graze on the trash heaps, and people living nearby pick out food waste to take home and feed their pigs...

Incineration produces large quantities of dioxins, furans and other persistent organic pollutants, hundreds or thousands of distinct compounds in all. Because household waste in China isn't sorted, it contains a lot of organic matter and therefore a lot of water, so burning it requires large amounts of coal and diesel as accelerants. That means more fly ash, higher carbon emissions and more toxic substances, and makes "waste-to-energy incineration" a misnomer. Slag has always been the awkward part: it comes to about 20% of the original volume of the waste, it is highly toxic, and it still has to be landfilled and still generates leachate. Some people have suggested sealing the slag away and dealing with it when the technology matures, the way nuclear waste is treated.

The bigger problem may be that we don't even know how much pollution the incinerators around us are producing.

In July 2016, Wuhu Ecology Center and Friends of Nature jointly released their Report on Information Disclosure and Pollutant Emissions at 231 Household Waste Incineration Plants, which found that incinerators nationwide disclose their emissions poorly, that exceeding the limits is common, and that the government has no matching penalties or corrective measures for it.

Lifting Up the People Who Lift Up City Life

What Wang Chao wants most right now, first of all, is his business license. He applied last December and it has dragged on ever since with no end in sight, which is the normal experience for recycling businesses. Second, he wants a fixed place to work in future, so he isn't chased from spot to spot. Third, he thinks the government should subsidize the collection of low-value material — glass, plastic bags — so that it still gets collected. Finally, he hopes recycling businesses can get government subsidies to buy sorting and baling equipment and trucks.

As for why this trade deserves public money, Wang Chao says it is because "what it's worth for the environment is far more than what it's worth economically." Then he added: "I hope society will stop looking at us strangely."

Chen Liwen calls these individual, "informal" collectors "the people who hold up city life with hard labor." They should be managed through a registration system, she argues, allowed to work in designated areas and to use the space and facilities there to sort and stack what they collect. The government should sort out their relations with property managers, neighborhood committees and chengguan, and "treat them well" together. She has another idea too: find some mechanism to let them into residential compounds to teach residents how to sort their waste.

Sorting waste properly takes real public participation, and public education on waste sorting in China is still nowhere near enough. These "scavengers" have become the real experts in sorting waste.

Lead image: a scrap collector in Beijing. Photo: Chen Liwen. Banner image from Unsplash.