Precis

Every morning, an army of scavengers swarm over Beijing’s rubbish piles. Piece by piece, they separate recyclables from waste. There’s enough to scrape a living, of sorts, for 170,000 rubbish pickers like Wang Jindong.

Wang lives in a shack without power or water with his wife and nephew Mengnan, 11. He took in the boy to stop him being sold by his ailing father.

“For his growth, his schooling, I would bear any hardship,” says Wang. The bottles he collects earn him less than a cent apiece, but they will put food on the table and cover Mengnan’s school fees.

Wang is one tiny cog in an informal and multi-layered recycling industry that handles a third of Beijing’s rubbish. But pickers like Wang may soon become a casualty of China’s drive to modernise its waste industry.

With its 1.4 billion people, China is the world’s second biggest waste producer after the US. Beijing alone churns out around 25,000 tonnes a day – two and a half times the amount of 20 years ago. Much of it ends up in vast leaky landfills or in hazardous backyard recycling operations.

So China is cracking down.

As correspondent Bill Birtles reports, Chinese consumers are being told to sort their own rubbish for recycling. Proposals are afoot to restrict single use packaging, including takeaway food containers. The government is pushing industrial-scale recycling and shutting down mum and dad operators. It wants big city incinerators to burn the majority of household waste by 2020.

None of which bodes well for Wang Jindong.

“We have vast numbers of rubbish pickers – they don’t have any skills or education,” says businesswoman Liu Xuesong. Ms Liu has installed 5000 collection machines around Beijing, inviting consumers to get cash for bottles. Middlemen like Wang are cut out.

“I want to give this industry more dignity,” she says.

But for now, China’s growing consumer society can’t get enough packaging. Each morning Rao Jian, 22, lines up with his fellow food delivery riders for a pep talk and a chant: “Move like the wind!”

Reporter Birtles goes with him as he hits the road, delivering some of the food and drinks that will add another 60 million plastic containers to China’s waste mountain, each and every day.

Recycling market

BILL BIRTLES: China used to take half the world’s recyclable rubbish – not any more.  They’ve got enough of their own. 

00:00

Birtles with man collecting bottles

 [at rubbish pile] “That’s about one cent Australian”.

00:12

Restaurant plastics

So what to do with the garbage generated by 1.4 billion people?

00:14

Birtles into car

“All right, we’re going to follow their car to the police station”.

00:20

Rubbish GVs

Tonight, we lift the lid on China’s rubbish crisis.

00:23

Title: foreign correspondent

Music

00:28

Bike dumping ground
Super: Outside Beijing

00:34

Super:
reporter
Bill Birtles

00:42

Birtles at bike dumping ground

BILL BIRTLES: We’ve travelled about an hour outside Beijing where the problems China faces managing its waste are on stark display.  This stockpile here is the result of share bike schemes gone wrong.  The bicycles were dumped here because they were clogging up Beijing streets.

00:47

Birtles to camera

[walking around all the bikes] “This is just one of many bicycle dumping grounds dotted across China.  They’re a symbol of a culture that produces and throws away on a massive scale and whether it’s bicycles, plastics or industrial waste, it’s a problem that’s getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

01:12

Episode title:
Tipping Point

Music

01:35

BILL BIRTLES: China’s government has now declared its own war on waste.  The question is, is it winning? 

01:42

Beijing/rubbish GVs

01:51

Nowhere illustrates better the scale of problems China faces in its war no waste than its capital Beijing.  With a population almost the same as Australia, each day the city produces 25,000 tonnes of waste – more than double what it churned out 20 years ago.

01:53

Bike couriers line up for morning chant

Music

02:13

COURIERS: [chanting] “Hello, your delivery has arrived.  Hope you enjoy it”.

02:18

BILL BIRTLES:  This army of food couriers is unwittingly at the frontline of the problem.

02:27

COURIERS: [chanting altogether] “Lei Feng! Lei Feng!  Move like the wind!”

02:34

Supervisor checks delivery bags

SUPERVISOR: [inspection of bags] “Get ready. Clean this bag!  What the heck is in it?”

BILL BIRTLES:  Food delivery is known here as “waimai”. 

02:44

Delivery couriers set off

In China’s big cities, you can order pretty much anything,

02:50

Birtles ordering on phone app

from a multi-course banquet to a single cup of coffee for next to nothing.

RAO JIAN: “It’s easy and convenient.

02:54

Rao Jian

Like at the moment, when the weather is hot, people get home from work, they want to rest.  If they order delivery it will save them time”.

03:02

Rao Jian delivering food

BILL BIRTLES: Food courier, Rao Jian, dreamed of following his father and grandfather into the army, but a disability made that impossible.  Now the 22-year-old is serving his countrymen in a different way.

03:14

Music

03:28

BILL BIRTLES: Every day he races against the clock, his job and income depend on getting good reviews.

03:34

Music

03:40

RAO JIAN: “There are fewer orders in the morning, but I will be busy for the lunchtime rush.  From 5.30 or so, during dinner time, I will be flat out again”.

04:16

BILL BIRTLES: These newly popular on-line delivery services are helping to generate vast amounts of plastic waste. 

04:36

Rao Jian collects food for delivery

Across the country, about 20 million orders are made each day, mainly from two major companies, producing around 60 million plastic containers.

04:44

RAO JIAN: “I’ve had colleagues who are called to deliver food from a restaurant on the ground floor to a flat upstairs”.

04:55

Rao Jian running up stairs to ABC office. Birtles takes delivery of coffee

Music

05:05

BILL BIRTLES: “Well this isn’t bad is it?  A freshly roasted hot coffee delivered right to the office door. You’ve got your milk, you’ve got your stirrer, you’ve got the bag to prevent spillage, but all this packaging for just one drink?  You can see why China’s government is worried”.

05:21

Birtles walking on street drinking coffee

Multiply by 60 million pieces every day across the country, and it’s no wonder the rubbish is piling up.

05:40

Birtles greet Chen Liwen at station

05:51

CHEN LIWEN: "Hi."

BILL BIRTLES:  "Hi, nice to meet you”.

CHEN LIWEN: “You too”.

05:58

BILL BIRTLES: “You’re travelling around basically promoting rubbish sorting?”

CHEN LIWEN: “Right”.

BILL BIRTLES: Chen Liwen knows

06:02

Liwen and Birtles walk through station

all too well the challenges faced by a country where more people are getting wealthy, fast.

CHEN LIWEN: “In some villages, they don’t have the basic infrastructure for waste management”.

06:09

BILL BIRTLES: She’s one of China’s most energetic environmental campaigners.

06:21

“And you’re off again tomorrow from Beijing, travelling again?”

CHEN LIWEN: “Yes. Travelling to Qinghai”.

06:25

BILL BIRTLES: “It sounds like you don’t have much time”.

06:33

Getting into car, travelling to dumps

Today, Chen Liwen is taking us to see where a good part of Beijing’s rubbish ends up – on the city’s outskirts.

06:34

CHEN LIWEN: “Historically, China's cities also send their waste to the countryside, but gradually the farmers refused because we have more and more non-organic stuff”.

06:44

Birtles and Liwen at dump

BILL BIRTLES: We’ve come to one of Beijing’s biggest and oldest dump sites, home to both a landfill and an incinerator, and this is about as close as we can get.

06:59

“So this is it”.

CHEN LIWEN: “The first time I came here was almost ten years ago.  It’s now so big.

07:14

It’s growing – like a building”.

07:23

BILL BIRTLES: In the past, this landfill contaminated he groundwater as far as four kilometres away.  Locals also worry about emissions from the incinerator.

07:27

CHEN LIWEN: “Over the years I have visited over 30 facilities, including landfills and incinerators across China. 

07:38

I could see how these facilities have impacted people’s lives.  People are suffering from the pollution.  Without sustainable waste management, we don’t have a future”.

07:47

Birds on wires

Music

08:04

Cat at dump

BILL BIRTLES: In its war to reduce waste, China has one major advantage –

08:14

Man empties bottles on to street

a vast network of rubbish pickers who keep much of the recyclable waste out of landfill and incineration

08:20

Birtles greets Wang

“Lao Wang.  Hi.  I’m Bill.  Where are you heading?”

WANG JINDONG: “To collect bottles”.

BILL BIRTLES:  Wang Jindong is one of Beijing’s 170,000 rubbish scavengers,

08:25

Wang sorts through rubbish with nephew

part of the informal recycling industry that currently handles about a third of the city’s garbage.  A migrant worker who left his home province ten years ago, Wang lives on the fringes of the capital in a brick shack with no electricity or running water. Wang and his wife took in their nephew, 11-year-old Mengnan after the child’s father became ill.

08:44

Mengnan

MENGNAN: “When my father was about to die he planned to sell one of us three brothers”.

INTERPRETER: “What?”

MENGNAN: “He planned to sell one child.  But he didn’t do it because my uncle didn’t want him to.  My dad still said he wanted to sell me, but he didn’t”.

09:13

Mengnan leaves for school

BILL BIRTLES: Wang is committed to giving his nephew an education.

WANG JINDONG: “Take your bag. Study hard.  If there’s anything you don’t know raise your hand and ask your teacher”.

09:44

Birtles and Wang at demolition site

BILL BIRTLES: Today, Wang is taking me with him to collect bottles on a demolition site covered with plastic mesh to keep down the dust.  It’s slow work.

10:08

Wang picking up one can and showing Birtles

“This is about less than one cent Australian… It's five or six dollars a day roughly Australian that you can make collecting rubbish here”.

10:23

Birtles and Wang at demolition site

The real money in rubbish comes from controlling turf.  Well-connected collectors cut deals with the big residential compounds,

10:48

paying for exclusive rights to handle their waste.

“Why don’t you pick up bottles inside the residential compound?”

WANG JINDONG: “They won’t let me in!

10:58

I’m only allowed to collect stuff outside”.

11:07

Birtles to camera

BILL BIRTLES: “Well, this is not the easiest way to make a living at the best of times, but it’s not even 10 am and it’s already getting up towards 35 degrees”.

11:13

Wang picking up bottles

WANG JINDONG: “It’s hot, but I have to bear it.  For my nephew I would bite my tongue. 

11:22

Wang ii

I won’t complain.  I’ll suppress it.  For his growth, his education, I would bear any hardships. I will bury it in my stomach.  I won’t let him suffer”.

11:35

Wang on bike

BILL BIRTLES:  The rubbish pickers are highly effective, according to Chen Liwen, who's studied them closely.

CHEN LIWEN: “They can recycle whatever the market can deal with.  When we did the field work and found out they recycled

11:54

Chen Liwen interview

almost 90 per cent of recyclables.  That is much, much higher than any developed countries. 

12:13

Mengnan at school

They rely on recycling to raise their family”.

12:21

BILL BIRTLES: Mengnan attends a local school set up for the children of the city’s migrant workers: It costs his uncle around $200 a year in fees.  But even in this marginalised community, the rubbish picker’s nephew is at the bottom of the pack.

12:30

INTERPRETER:  “Do you have a good relationship with your classmates?”

MENGNAN: “Not good”.

INTERPRETER: “Why?”

12:47

MENGNAN: “I don’t know. 

12:52

They all think my family is poor. They all look down on me”.

12:55

Mengnan watches boys play table tennis

13:03

Wang collects Mengnan from school and they walk home

BILL BIRTLES: The rubbish collectors might be efficient, but their future is uncertain.  Most like Wang Jindong come from outside the city.  In recent crackdowns, Beijing has tried to force them out.  Recently, Wang has head that the buildings around his home are slated for demolition and he fears his could be next.

WANG JINDONG: “Look at this place.

13:09

Birtles enters Wang’s home

What can I say?”.

BILL BIRTLES: “Is there where you cook?”

WANG JINDONG: “Yes”.

MENGNAN: “Here behind you”.

13:38

WANG JINDONG: “I think for this house they haven’t told me yet,

13:48

Wang interview

but I might be able to hold out here until August or September”.

13:56

Bottles into recycling bin

14:02

Liu Xuesong by recycling machine

BILL BIRTLES: The rubbish pickers are facing another threat.  It comes from entrepreneurs like Liu Xuesong who’s at the forefront of a government push to solve the waste crisis with hi-tech solutions.

14:08

Liu interview

LIU XUESONG: “In China we have vast numbers of rubbish collectors and our recycling rate isn’t bad. Our problem is we can’t monitor where it all goes.  There’s no supervision, there is no clear information.  I’ve always had a dream.  I wish to give this industry more dignity”.

14:25

Liu Xuesong demonstrates recycling machine to children

BILL BIRTLES: Liu’s company aims to cut out the rubbish collectors by encouraging individuals to recycle.  Each bottle credits just under one cent to your bank account.

14:44

LIU XUESONG: [showing children how to use the machine] “Look – this way is much better.  Good!  Do you want to try?”

BILL BIRTLES: Her company has placed 5,000 of these machines around Beijing.

14:56

There’s a daily limit of 20 to 30 bottles per user, designed to stop the rubbish pickers from cashing in.  The company then transports the bottles to a plastics processing factory and ultimately turns them into consumer goods.

15:11

Liu Xuesong with children

LIU XUESONG: “Do you know the purpose of taking in these bottles?  Do you know?

YOUNG GIRL: “To be recycled”.

LIU XUESONG: “What does it make?”

YOUNG BOY: “Clothes”.

LIU XUESONG: “Clothes.  What else?”

15:30

[shot continuous]

YOUNG BOY: “Trousers”.

LIU XUESONG: “Trousers, great!

YOUNG BOY: “A bag”.

LIU XUESONG: “That’s right!”

“We make fashion items, a t-shirt made from eight bottles.  A bag made from fourteen bottles. 

15:40

Liu interview

We work with designers from Japan and the US to make something fun and beautiful to attract more young people”.

15:51

Recycling machine

Music

16:02

Wang on his bike laden with rubbish

16:07

BILL BIRTLES: Wang Jindong is still recycling the old-fashioned way.  He peddles his wares to a market more than an hour across town, another small cog in the informal recycling chain.

16:15

Wang counting rubbish at market

“One handful. Two handfuls.

16:30

The market I sell to has to make money too. So they on-sell the bottles and take their cut.

16:35

Sixteen handfuls

16:44

The bottles are transferred three or four times before the factories eventually process them.

16:45

Man carries bag of bottles away

[to man at market] I want that bag back”.

16:53

Waste market shots. Woman pays Wang

BILL BIRTLES: Here the city’s trash turns into treasure.  Any item useful for manufacturing – plastic, cardboard, metal – has a value here. It’s been a good day. Mr Wang’s made about thirty dollars from a week’s garbage, enough to support his family for another week.

17:02

Birtles on street to camera

“From here the plastic bottles, cardboard and other packaging collected on the streets of Beijing begin the long journey away from the capital”.

The question is, where does it all go from here?

17:27

Trucks carrying waste materials

When the government announced its ban on foreign waste last year, it also cracked down on

17:42

Excerpt from documentary

backyard recycling centres like this.

DOCUMENTARY: “After crushing, the foreign waste is reduced to plastic fragments.  It is then washed in a trough.  The dirty foreign waste is then turned into plastic pellets”.

BILL BIRTLES: As this recent State media documentary reveals, authorities are making a show of closing down these centres because they’re a danger to workers’ health and the environment.

17:50

DOCUMENTARY: “This is a waste water pit next to the factory.  If handled like this, the water will seep under the soil.  The journalist discovered many pits like this in the village fields”.

18:13

Trucks carry waste materials

BILL BIRTLES: But have all these backyard operators really shut down? And if they have, where is China’s domestic waste being recycled?  We decide to visit what once was the biggest centre for plastic recycling in Northern China,

18:30

Birtles walks on street in Wen'an

the Wen’an district, an hour from Beijing.  While processing was officially shut down here some years ago, I’ve heard there’s still some going on.

18:50

Birtles looking at shop fronts

“PPPE some sort of plastic product there”.

19:05

Birtles sees truck with a load of plastic

And there are indications recycling is happening nearby.

“Here’s another truck with plastic pellets that have gone through the recycling process already.   And they’re ready to be taken away and used for manufacturing”.

19:07

Birtles approaches man at gate

But if it is still happening, it’s well hidden.

“Do they still do plastic recycling here?”

MAN: “I don’t know”.

BILL BIRTLES: “This isn’t a reprocessing place here?”

MAN: “It’s all gone. They don’t do it here anymore”.

19:23

Birtles knocks on gate

19:49

Shop fronts

BILL BIRTLES:  I call one of the numbers on the shopfronts and the man tells me he’s moved his business to inner Mongolia, in China’s far north.

19:54

CHEN LIWEN: “When the centre was closed people would shift it to a more remote area to continue their business,

20:03

Chen Liwen interview

because we still have so much plastic.  We didn’t solve the problem.  It’s just shifted the pollution from one very concentrated centre to more dispersed villages.

20:12

Birtles standing on Wen'an street

BILL BIRTLES: In Wen’an there are cameras everywhere. 

20:27

Security cameras

Music

20:30

Officials gather around Birtles

BILL BIRTLES: About half an hour after our arrival, local officials turn up.  Whatever is going on here, they don’t want us to see it.

20:35

Birtles on street to camera

“So it didn’t take too long for the cops to find us so they’re wanting us to come down and have a word with them before, supposedly, they’ll show us one of these local factories here.  We’ll see”.

20:45

Birtles at police station

After an hour at the station, the police take us to lunch, then send us on our way.

20:56

Shots from vehicle

They say plastic processing has all been shut down in Wen’an and moved to other parts of China.

21:11

Beijing GVs including food couriers

Music

21:19

BILL BIRTLES: Back in Beijing, there are some aspects to the rubbish system the government is

21:29

Birtles gets on to bus for media. tour

keen to showcase.
[to camera] “City officials have organised a media tour to show us how they’re dealing with Beijing’s waste”.

21:33

Journalists on media tour

Music

21:43

BILL BIRTLES:  Beijing is one of 46 cities across the country trialling a new rubbish sorting system.

21:50

GUIDE: “People can volunteer to take part. Reducing the volume of rubbish, sorting it. It all starts here”.

21:55

People putting waste into bins

BILL BIRTLES: The government effort so far to convince city dwellers to sort their waste haven’t gone well.

WOMAN: [sorting rubbish] “They recyclable rubbish should be in this bin.  This is plastic – you put it in here”.

22:06

ERIC LIU: “You could go to any of the compounds or bins around here

22:20

Eric Liu interview

and there are different bins for different kinds of rubbish, but it would all be mixed together. This is extremely common.  This is a big problem for rubbish recycling in China”.

22:28

Eric in Greenpeace office looking at computer

BILL BIRTLES:  Eric Liu is the lead plastics campaigner for Greenpeace. He thinks the government needs to do more than educate people about rubbish sorting, it needs to make it compulsory.

22:41

Eric Liu interview

ERIC LIU: “There is no obligation for every household to sort its rubbish.  That’s the way it is and we should change it”.

22:55

Rubbish into garbage truck

Music

23:03

Rubbish to incinerator

BILL BIRTLES: Once collected, Beijing’s rubbish is compacted, then trucked on to one of the world’s largest incinerators

23:11

Media tour continues to Lujiashan incinerator

and that’s the next stop on our tour.  The Lujiashan incinerator, in the hills west of Beijing, burns about an eighth of the city’s garbage, transforming the heat into energy.

23:19

Media at incinerator

According to Zhang Yueshang from the city government, each year this plant produces the same amount of electricity as 140,000 tonnes of coal.

ZHANG YUESHANG: “When we designed this incinerator

23:39

Zhang interview

we followed European standards.  Some of our technology actually exceeds those standards”.

23:52

Incinerator and control centre

BILL BIRTLES: China wants its big cities to burn more than half their household waste by the end of this decade, but if the rubbish isn’t properly sorted, there are problems.

24:02

ERIC LIU: “When mixed rubbish, in particular with plastics, goes into the incinerators there’s a very good change it will generate

24:15

Eric Liu interview

some harmful emissions like dioxin”.

24:25

Inside incinerator

ZHANG YUESHANG: “We can control the overall level of emissions

24:29

Zhang interview

so if you look at the environmental impact compared to other methods currently available this has the lowest impact”.

24:36

Inside incinerator

BILL BIRTLES: But from what we see here today, there’s still a lot of plastics in the mix.  It’s clear China has a long way to go.

24:46

Beijing. Night. GVs

25:00

Rao Jian returns home

For food courier Rao Jian, it’s been another long day on the streets of Beijing.  He’s returning to the flat he shares with 11 other food couriers, all from other parts of China.

25:10

Rao unpacks food and eats

RAO JIAN: “Thigs haven’t been going so well recently.  I twisted my foot and I’s been hard to make deliveries.  It’s affected how many jobs I can do”.

25:28

BILL BIRTLES: The Central Government is now considering restrictions on packaging, including take away food containers.  Rao Jian hasn’t heard about these plans, but he agrees there needs to be change.

RAO JIAN: “Take chopsticks as an example.  Each order has at least one set of cutlery. 

25:37

Rao interview

The app has an option of choosing ‘no cutlery’. I think people should strengthen their sense of environmental protection”.

25:59

Cat on wall/Mengnan doing homework

Music

26:15

Birtles arrives to revisit Wang

BILL BIRTLES: I’ve come back to see the rubbish picker Wang Jindong and his nephew.  Six weeks earlier he told us he was worried the local government would try to force him out of his home.

“Well this is a bit of a surprise.

26:26

Since we were here last time, they’ve completely bricked up this lane where their house is.  I don’t even know if they’re home anymore”.

26:43

Wang peers over brick wall. Conversation takes place over wall

WANG JINDONG: “I’m home. I’m here.  How are you doing?”

BILL BIRTLES: “What’s with this wall?”

WANG JINDONG: “It was built by the demolition people, sent by the government”.

26:53

BILL BIRTLES: “Are you still living here?”

WANG JINDONG: “Still here”.

27:08

BILL BIRTLES: Wang Jindong doesn’t know how much longer their house will remain standing, but he says whatever happens, they’ll try to stay in Beijing.

27:12

WANG JINDONG: “This wall – they wanted to kick us out. They won’t allow us to be in Beijing.

27:21

The government’s trying to drive us back home.  I can’t go back to my hometown”.

27:27

Wang and family inside walled area

BILL BIRTLES:  With his rubbish cart bricked in, Wang is trying to support his family by picking up casual labour jobs. It’s not the future he dreams of for his nephew.

27:31

Mengnan does homework. Wang sits, smoking

WANG JINDONG: “I wish in the future he could go to university. If not, I hope he could master a skill and support himself for the rest of his life.  My hope is that for his whole life he has food to eat and he can have a family and a career.  Then my job will be done”.

27:50

Mengnan climbs over wall

BILL BIRTLES:  China wants to make a cleaner future for 11-year-old Mengnan, but if the rubbish pickers disappear he could be growing up in a country that recycles less than it does now.  As the big cities modernise, the lives of those who have done the most to keep them clean will be more precarious than ever.

28:21

Credits star over. Wang and Mengnan

Reporter - Bill Birtles

Producers - Charles Li, Lisa McGregor

Camera - Steve Wang

Drone Operator - Brant Cumming

Editor - Peter O'Donoghue

Executive Producer - Marianne Leitch
foreign correspondent
absolutely.net.au/foreign
© 2018

28:50

Outpoint after credits

29:18