On April 24, at a recyclables sorting center in Changping, Beijing, a staff member unpacks plastic waste and sends it to a conveyor belt for compression and baling. Most of the blue plastic is the company's dedicated recyclable collection bag, which will also be sold to renewable resource processing companies to make the most of it.
A worker dismantles tangled steel bars at a recyclables sorting center in Changping, Beijing, on April 24. These steel bars are dismantled one by one and put into a compressor to make steel "bricks".
On April 24, at a recyclables sorting center in Changping, Beijing, workers in the scrap metal section used a remote control to operate a giant manipulator to place metal "square bricks". Behind him were compressed discarded fire extinguishers, piled up into a giant "wall" several meters high next to the factory.
On April 24, in Changping District, Beijing, a waste recycler further dismantled coils obtained from a microwave oven. The main material of these coils is copper, and the unit price per kilogram is more than 20 yuan.
On March 14, at the recyclables transfer station in Chengshousi Street, Beijing, staff dumped a bag of waste plastic bottles for re-sorting. Although it is common for recyclers to simply separate between plastic bottles made of different materials before delivery, there will inevitably be mix-ups.
On March 23, in Yixin Park, Beijing, a child was waiting in line to deliver a takeaway lunch box. The area around Yixin Park is mostly residential, and it is mainly the elderly who usually participate in the recycling of lunch boxes, but there are also many parents who came to the event to hand over the takeaway lunch boxes to the children, hoping to raise their environmental awareness through their own participation.
On May 11, in the Haili Recycling Industrial Park in Haiyan County, Zhejiang Province, a staff member inspects the appearance of recycled yarn for subsequent grading. The quality index of recycled yarn can be divided into two categories: physical index and appearance index, physical index focuses on the thickness and rigidity of yarn, and appearance index pays attention to color, wool and other conditions. Different quality indicators are applied to manufacture different categories of products.
On May 10, in a building in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, two girls were photographing a roll of recycled yarn. They have just opened an account on a video platform and are ready to produce and distribute content related to the apparel industry.
On May 11, in the Haili Recycling Industrial Park in Haiyan County, Zhejiang Province, staff were screening non-PET plastic bottles. Compared with other plastic materials, PET (polyethylene terephthalate) has good heat resistance and chemical stability, so it is often used to make durable bottles, tough fibers, safe food packaging, medical supplies and other products, and is widely used in life and industrial fields.
"This bag can be exchanged for two packs of wipes!" Early one morning on the weekend, in Yixin Park, Beijing, Yin Tao, who was wearing a green vest with a brochure, took over more than a dozen takeaway lunch boxes from the crowd and completed a "transaction". As the head of the Chengshousi Street Recyclables Transfer Station, he has been regularly collecting takeaway lunch boxes at this community park on the edge of Beijing's South Second Ring Road since last year. The green banner with the words "Box Fusion" printed at the event attracted many surrounding residents to come and explore. Yin Tao and the other speakers patiently explained that the takeaway garbage that these scrap dealers do not collect is now a "resource" for them to recycle, which can be exchanged for gifts on the spot, including gel pens, highlighters and pencil cases recycled from recycled takeaway lunch boxes.
In October 2023, in order to further strengthen Beijing's plastic pollution control, the Beijing Municipal Development and Reform Commission and the Beijing Urban Management Committee, which is responsible for garbage sorting and recycling, began to pilot the large-scale recycling of takeaway lunch boxes as recyclables in garbage classification. Prior to this, according to the Beijing Recyclables Guidance Catalogue (2021 Edition) (hereinafter referred to as the "Catalogue"), although takeaway lunch boxes are recyclable plastic products, they are often stained and are recommended to be classified as other garbage for incineration or landfilling.
Under the new pilot program, a portion of the takeaway boxes will be processed in a new process to realize their regenerative value. They will be transported to the recyclables transfer station for temporary storage, and when they accumulate to a certain amount, they will be sent to the recycling resource sorting center on the outskirts of the city, where they will be professionally processed and sold to processing and manufacturing enterprises using waste plastics as raw materials, and "transformed" into clothing, mobile phone cases, shopping bags and various stationery to enter the consumer market again.
In fact, the journey experienced by the takeaway lunch box is also the basic treatment method for recyclables such as waste paper, waste plastic bottles, and scrap metal identified in the 2021 Catalogue.
From the early evening, the recyclables transfer station on the streets of Naishusura enters the busiest time of the day. There are two peak delivery periods of municipal solid waste, morning and evening, and the recyclers usually return to the transfer station in the evening to late at night to concentrate on unloading the recyclables collected for one day. The recycling price of cardboard, books, cans, foam and other items ranges from 0.1 yuan to 10 yuan per kilogram. The coarsely sorted recyclables are removed sequentially according to the partition and then carefully sorted by the specialists in each area. For example, although mineral water bottles and shampoo bottles are plastic, the former is often made of PET, and the latter is mostly made of HDPE.
Transit stations in various neighborhoods of the city are the "first stop" for recyclables to walk from the garbage cans in every household to the recycling system. However, for environmental reasons, transit stations tend to be small in scale and have limited "resources" that can be stored. In contrast, most of the sorting centers located on the outskirts of the city have an area of more than 10,000 square meters, which is a veritable "super factory". Every day, a steady stream of transport vehicles transport dozens of tons of recyclables here, and after unpacking, sorting, compression, packaging and other links, they are sent to renewable resource processing and utilization enterprises to realize "turning waste into treasure".
In the exhibition hall of a textile company in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, a dazzling array of goods such as coats, home textiles and dolls made from recycled yarn attracted visitors' attention. Every year, about 10 billion discarded plastic bottles are "reborn" at the company's factory, which are first chopped into small pieces, heated and melted into a ball of liquid polyester, and then pulled out of the fine fibers like marshmallows through special spinnerets. After stretching, cooling, and finally being cut into recycled yarn of suitable length, it becomes one of the raw materials for textiles. These recycled yarns have also been used to make football World Cup jerseys and have appeared on the international stage.
According to the research report of the national think tank "Concept and Practice of China's Plastic Pollution Control" released in April 2022, China's waste plastic material recycling volume in 2021 will be about 19 million tons, and the material recycling rate will be 31%, which is 1.74 times the global average, and 100% domestic material recycling has been realized, ranking first in the world in terms of recycling and recycling capacity and output. At present, there are more than 15,000 enterprises engaged in the recycling and recycling of waste plastics, creating jobs for about 900,000 people.
Everyone is a participant in this road of regeneration, which focuses on both economic and social benefits. After the popularization of science by Yin Tao and his colleagues, more and more residents began to take the initiative to save and clean takeaway lunch boxes to prepare for the next delivery event; As the hot summer approaches, the bottles that people discard after drinking will also go into the recyclables warehouses in various cities and enter the next cycle.
Intern Chen Pengduo Photography Intern Chen Pengduo China Youth Daily Reporter Kong Siqi Writing Source: China Youth Daily
Source: China Youth Daily