I have a totally different experience about trash from other members in the research group. I come from Linhai, a small town in southeastern China. (See the maps and images for Linhai at https://www.google.com/search?biw=1366&bih=608&tbm=isch&sa=1&ei=Eim6XK3ZC4WUsgWZgJWACw&q=LINHAI+CHINA&oq=LINHAI+CHINA&gs_l=img.3..0j0i24.2326.3122..3683...0.0..0.152.771.0j6......1....1..gws-wiz-img.......0i67j0i30j0i8i30.4TsdMWk0ItM).
Linhai was founded over a thousand years ago, and it is now a popular tourist place. To keep the city clean, our government set a lot of trash bins along the main streets and employed plenty of sanitation workers. Here, almost all the public trash bins are labeled with a “recyclables only” or “non-recyclables only” sign. However, the different kind of trash bins are always filled with the same mix of all kinds of trash, because people never do the classification. This phenomenon exists almost all over my country, because both kind of the recyclable and non-recyclable wastes are collected by the government, and they use only one garbage truck to collect both kind of trash together. People feel that it is useless to sort their trash -- classified trash would end up all together!
You may wonder how the trash is sorted in China. In my town, there is a “trash recycling center” where people can sell their cans, cardboard, and plastic wastes. I remember a plastic bottle was 0.3 Yuan (around 0.04 US dollars) and a soda can was 0.1 Yuan each (around 0.01 US dollars). Such a reward discourages many people from participating. The initial sorting of the mix trash is usually taken over by jobless individuals or the elderly, who have a lot of time and willing to accept such income. When I was in elementary school, I lived in the oldest area in my town where most residents were elderly people. Here, a lot of my neighbours would pick up plastic bottles when they took a walk after dinner. Because the price of each piece of recyclable trash is so low, many of the collectors prefer to accumulate a huge collection and then exchange them at once. This way, they can earn a larger amount of money instead of getting some small coins.
I remember my neighbour, an elderly lady who lived alone, had an extremely large collection of recyclable materials on her balcony. She exchanged her recyclables around twice a year, and her collection was usually so large that we could hardly see her windows through the trash. Although she classified different recyclables according to their types and kept them in an organized manner, her balcony smelled because she never washed her collection (the recycling center didn’t ask people to wash the trash before giving it to them).
Most of the elderly who have pension, or those who live with their children, collect recyclable waste, too. However, they didn’t collect the waste on the street and had relatively small collections. For example, my grandparents only collect the recyclable trash produced in our house. Because my parents thought that accumulating “trash” would cause disease, we usually give the recyclables to the recycling center for free every week.
I knew it might be hard for people from other countries to imagine what that would be like, so I asked my mom if she have any picture that can help me explain such phenomenon. Here is what I got:
This picture was taken at the square near my home. It shows an elderly and the plastic bottles collected by him. He usually takes a walk after dinner, and he always take a huge bag with him to collect plastic bottles and cans he met. Many people who hang out here know him. They usually give him the bottles after they finish their drink. He can collect around 80 bottles a night.
This is the picture that shows the collection of recyclable waste in my family this week. There are milk powder cans, laundry detergent bottles, and oil bottles. My mom had already put them in a big plastic bag and was about to give them to the recycling center for free.
Would the Precious Plastic project harm the existing plastic management system at DePauw University and in Greencastle? Would introducing a new way of dealing/handling plastic waste cause unemployment? Does the current system have has any ineffectiveness that our program can help to fix? To answer these questions, our group decided to research the present recycling system.
Precious Plastic is a very big organization that have workspace and participants almost all over the world. The basic purpose of this project is to build a workspace where plastic waste are melt to make new products. The founder of Precious Plastic suggested several ways to accumulate enough plastic waste: using our own plastic trash, collecting plastic trash that is were dropped carelessly in the community, and purchasing washed plastic from the community. Considering that the size of a Precious Plastic workspace is fairly large and could deal with a lot of plastic, people who that run the workspace might adopt all those sources to get enough materials. Therefore, if a big precious plastic workspace is built at DePauw, people living in the surrounding community might have a chance to exchange their plastic recyclables/trash for cash. That is to say, instead of spending money on requesting services from the trash companies, residents of the Greencastle town might be able to earn money by collecting their own plastic trash.
A Precious Plastic workspace, therefore, would probably negatively influence the trash service companies. But how could we eliminate this effect/repercussion/consequence?
If our Precious Plastic workspace purchases the plastic waste from the local community, the plastic recycling situation might be pretty similar to the one of my hometown. The only difference is that all the trash service is taken care of by the government and there are is no private companies providing that provides trash services. How would the trash companies here be affected? What happens when some of the residents decide to sell their recyclable plastic trash to us instead, but not leave it to the current companies? How much would our addition into the system harm the profit of the trash companies? Would our project cause any other social impacts? We have met with the representative from Ray’s recycling, the trash service provider of our school, but I am still not sure about those questions. The best solution to for make both of us happy seems to be seemed to be taking those trash that were is not preferred by the trash companies.
by Vinnie Zhan
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