For more than 30 years, it has been like a duckweed, and it has risen and fallen. The first half of many scavengers is a portrayal of a better life at the bottom, and a vivid depiction of the changes in urban waste countermeasures.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account ” Journal of Finance “(ID: i-caijing) , author: Yu Qin, with Hui Lian, editor: Zhu Tao, the original title: picking up the rivers and lakes rise and fall | “Finance” feature draft.
Zhao Sheng is a scavenger on the assembly line. Every day, he works closely on a conveyor belt, glances, explores, splits, and quickly sorts out recyclables such as plastic, metal, rubber, etc. from the inside and throws them into the woven bag behind him.
This is the Beijing Asuwei Garbage Comprehensive Treatment Center, which handles more than 5,000 tons of domestic waste a day – equivalent to one-fifth of the daily production of domestic garbage in Beijing. In the past ten years, Zhaosheng Intercontinental Science and Trade Co., Ltd., where Zhao Sheng is located, has contracted Asuwei’s domestic garbage sorting and recycling project, and is responsible for the sorting volume of 1600-1800 tons per day.
Zhao Sheng’s job is to classify waste to the extreme. Light is plastic, he can split a dozen, and can also distinguish which is more valuable. For example, the light is a beverage bottle, the material of the bottle cap, the bottle body, and the wrapping paper are different; when you get a transparent plastic storage box, you must pull the colored handles off the box. The two materials are different, and the transparency is more valuable.
After sorting on the assembly line, the remaining garbage is used to incinerate power generation and landfill; and those picked up will be reborn in paper mills, plastic products factories, and metal products factories.
Zhao Sheng are from remote, barren villages and depend on the city’s domestic waste for their livelihood. They searched for trash in garbage bins, garbage buildings, and factory-style garbage sorting workshops. Some of them also took tricycles and shouted “collecting waste products” along the street.
At the peak, the number of pickers in Beijing reached 170,000. The evaluation of this group is extremely polarized: On the one hand, the transactions between the scavengers are not included in the national economic system; on the other hand, the amount of waste they recycle and the amount of garbage sent to the waste treatment plant Quite, it is the second half of garbage disposal expenses in Beijing. On the one hand, they alleviate the phenomenon of urban garbage siege; on the other hand, they are outside the supervision and create environmental pollution in production and trading.
Under the encroachment of a series of policies such as non-capital function relief, environmental remediation, and garbage sorting, the living space of Beijing scavengers is becoming narrower.
More than 30 years, like duckweed