Letter from Beijing: Not much is discarded in Beijing. Walking to work in the early morning they're there. Walking home in the evening they're there too: the bag men and women, the city's unofficial recyclers, writes Mark Godfrey
Recycling has become an informal industry in China's capital, keeping many low earners and jobless afloat in a land obsessed with economic growth and personal enrichment.
I watched an old lady inching along the massive paved esplanade in front of Oriental Plaza, Beijing's enormous commercial complex built recently on top of a neighbourhood of old hutong cottages, 10 minutes walk from Tienanmen Square. As she moved I noticed she pulled a thin string after her. A dog, I presumed. But no, attached was a neat stack of cardboard boxes, broken up and laid flat one upon the other.
The Chinese have realised there's cash in other people's rubbish and a large population of the city's unemployed and poor prowl shopping malls, office blocks and streetside refuse depots sifting for paper, plastic bottles, glass, metals or reusable clothes. Everything goes.
Others pedal heavy three-wheeled bicycles along the dusty streets, hauling barrels on a trailer to gather slops and left-overs from local restaurants. On the city's less-policed suburbs, people topple over bins to seek out the reusables and the food scraps which are then taken on the three-wheeled chariots to feed pigs. China is the world's largest producer of pork (for domestic use) and pig farmers are willing to pay for healthy feed.
"I sell the month's newspapers for 100 yuan [about €10.80\]," said Yan Zhu, a secretary at a city property development company. It's a handy addition to her 2,000 RMB (€215) monthly salary. "I can take my family to dinner on the takings - to a nice dinner."
Environmentalism is not a noted Chinese preoccupation but China's sparse resources make it pay to be green. Rising productivity in the domestic papermaking and a shortage of timber resources have driven wastepaper imports up. China's imports of wastepaper from the US and Europe have increased considerably in the past decade and are expected to continue to expand.
In 2002, according to the National Bureau of Statistics in Beijing, China spent $350 million on wastepaper imports, the largest amount of foreign exchange expended on the import of any single item. Wastepaper is imported in accordance with permits issued by the Environmental Protection Administration. These exempt import duties and generally encourage wastepaper imports.
Increasing restrictions elsewhere have in the past decade made South Asia the leading destination of waste exports. Exports of plastic waste to the region jumped considerably in the 90s, making China, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan the world's largest buyers of plastic waste.
The economic and environmental implications of China's recycling business are both positive and negative. Waste trade is helping to feed families who might otherwise go hungry but loose environmental laws have allowed dumps and unregulated waste treatment centres to blight the Chinese countryside, recycling huge amounts of imported waste.
The toxic waste trade into the People's Republic of China was exposed in the early 1990s, when a US television programme highlighted the destruction of China's countryside by Chinese and international waste traders building toxic waste dumps for foreign chemical waste and other hazardous substances.
It wasn't until April 1996 that China implemented tough new laws to tackle a looming environmental crisis, severely penalising waste traders importing unauthorised foreign waste. Imports of waste plastic met such controversy that Indonesia banned all such imports in 1993.
China and Indonesia are the world's biggest importers of wastepaper, followed by India and Thailand. The Irish-owned Smurfit paper group exports wastepaper to China. India and Pakistan are the largest importers of scrap metal, though China also imports large quantities. Though Asia still remains relatively open to waste imports, environmental activists have been highlighting the environmental degradation caused in Asia by what is ostensibly an environmentally friendly practice, recycling western refuse.
Bag-men and bottle-collectors may be doing the city a big favour. The breakneck speed of China's economic growth has presented the ugly problem of waste management: refuse-collection and disposal remain concepts in their infancy in the sprawling suburbs of the country's capital, Beijing. Rises in personal income and the influx of western consumer products with World Trade Organisation entry has created waste mountains unfathomable to the city's older generations. They are used to more frugal years, when China was more insular and ideologically driven. Waste-collection charges exist, but only in theory.
Authorities in China's larger cities impose household refuse collection charges. Local people pay 3 yuan (28 cents) while foreigners are charged 2 yuan (21 cents) a month in Beijing for collection of household waste. Even though a recent government-sponsored survey revealed that 98 per cent of residents were willing to pay refuse collection fees, the successful collection rate for the charge is stuck at a miserable 10 per cent.
While in Europe the "polluter pays" principle has become enshrined in public policy and mentalities, the Chinese view waste as a resource, "something that will be sold and make money", according to Wang Yuan, a Beijing apartment block superintendent.
"There is a type of person known to Beijing people as 'trash entrepreneurs'. They earn a working wage every month by picking through rubbish bins and dumps all day every day."
Outside a department store on the city's thronged pedestrian shopping strip, Wangfujing, a young man proudly leads his bicycle away, hung both sides with shoes boxes, neatly tied up. He had only gone 10 metres down the street however when he stopped and jumped off the bike: he'd spotted a plastic bottle and a drink can protruding from a bin. Popping it into one of several plastic bags which he had hung on the handlebars, he pedalled onwards.
Then, taking a notepad out of his shirt pocket he chalked up the day's haul so far, making strokes on separate pages to keep his records neat. Trash entrepreneurs keep accounts too.