Have you ever noticed the garbage bins around Beijing? Ever since moving here about four years ago, something about them has been eating away at me. Why are bins, clearly designated recycling-only, filled with blended waste? And why do bins with separate openings for recyclables lead to a single undiscriminating container?

After some digging, some reading, a couple phone calls and a field trip, I found the answers to my questions. To my surprise, these answers revealed the involvement of two seemingly unrelated government departments, a decades-old informal market-oriented system and a pretty serious impending problem; ripe with opportunity. Below are my findings.





Findings: The State Department(s)

In Beijing, general waste and recycling is handled and administered by two separate departments. Disposing of the contents left in community garbage bins is the responsibility of the Sanitation Department, which itself belongs to the Beijing Municipal Commission of City Administration and Environment. However, the Sanitation Department is not permitted to pick up recyclables as recycling is under the purview of the Beijing Municipal Commission of Commerce. The consequence of this is that anything left in city bins – even those marked recycling – is treated as general waste and brought to disposal facilities to be burned or buried.

OK. So this was reasonably straightforward. The government department that operates the recycling bins scattered about the city is not in charge of recycling. The government department that is in charge of recycling has nothing to do with the bins.

Got it.

But this discovery wasn’t particularly satisfying. Rather, it simply raised more questions. Why do these bins offer a recycling option in the first place? And how does recycling actually work in Beijing today?







Findings: Greenbands and Recycling Bins

Beijing, as a matter of practical policy, first started taking recycling seriously in the lead up to the 2008 Summer Olympics. Pilot recycling programs, wherein two or three kinds of bins were installed in several communities, were launched. To their credit, the government realized that education was needed to alter behavior; so they trained green-armband-wearing instructors, dubbed Greenbands.

Greenbands were tasked with teaching Beijingers how to properly sort their waste by standing near community garbage bins, ready to dispense knowledge. Unfortunately, Beijingers, never fully acknowledging the authority of Greenbands, simply dropped their trash in whatever bin was most convenient.

Compounding this problem was the aggressive waste reduction targets set by the Beijing Municipal Commission of City Administration and Environment. These targets didn’t account for the time necessary for Beijingers to fully internalize non-incentivized recycling; a completely novel concept at the time. Eventually, Greenbands gave up trying to educate and simply set about sorting the trash themselves. In communities like Xiangshang in Dongcheng, Greenbands would literally spend all day sorting whatever waste was left in the bins.

But, if there was ever any doubt about the Chinese entrepreneurial spirit, Greenbands opted to make the best of a sticky situation. They realized that leaving recyclables in the designated bins carried an opportunity cost. They realized they could supplement their income by selling items to local junkmen.







Findings: Junkmen and Non-Governmental Recycling Markets

At this point, a bit of background information is needed. As mentioned, the Beijing Municipal Commission of Commerce is responsible for recycling in Beijing. In the early 1980s, they decided they had no real interest in operating state-owned recycling markets and outsourced operations to non-governmental material recycling companies. It would seem that simply collecting fees, free from the burden of day-to-day operations, was a much more attractive arrangement.

At the same time, workers started migrating to cities like Beijing in hopes of finding a better life. China’s rapid economic development in the 1990s only served to amplify this phenomenon. With most migrant workers unable to easily obtain permanent residence permits, new arrivals set about finding ways to make a living. One popular vocation proved to be buying and selling recyclables.

These workers, known as junkmen (known colloquially in Chinese as shou po lan, 收破烂), roamed local community streets collecting and purchasing recyclables from the locals. As this practice became commonplace, Beijingers began purposely setting aside items they knew could be sold, with the explicit intent of making a few extra RMB. As a brief aside, you can still witness this today. It is still popular for students to sell their old school books, by weight no less, to junkmen.

Junkmen made their purchase decisions based on whether or not they believed a particular item could be resold at a profit. They then sold these recyclables, mostly plastics, glass and other unwanted appliances, to recycling markets. In a very real way, recycling in China became a market-oriented individual business.







Findings: Problems Incoming

In the past few years, many of Beijing’s recycling markets have been demolished. The largest ones, such as Dongxiaokou and Dongsanqi in Changping District, or Qinglonghe in Chaoyang District, operated over 1,000 stalls to collect and sort materials. To put this in perspective, the recently demolished Dongxiaokou collected nearly 25 percent of all recyclables in Beijing and housed over 20,000 migrants.

And therein lies the problem.

Beijingers have long relied on junkmen and an informal market-oriented recycling system. In fact, junkmen, including those representing recycling markets, account for 90 percent of all the recycling done in Beijing. An unfortunate consequence of this is that the youth recycle less than their forbearers.

You see, many people’s understanding of what constitutes a recyclable is entirely informed by what junkmen are willing to purchase; anything that can't be sold is, by default, considered regular waste. In other words, a plastic bottle is not a recyclable because it is made of plastic; it is a recyclable because it can be sold. As such, the opportunity to make a few extra RMB incentivizes recycling. This draw has proven to be insufficient in enticing most young Beijingers to recycle. One can only imagine what will be done with the plastic and cardboard packaging discarded from USD 14.3 billion worth of singles day purchases.

So as migrant workers are forced to leave and recycling markets get demolished, we are left with the question: who will pick up the slack?

Certainly, this problem is much too large to answer here. But suffice to say that whoever can solve this issue is in for a big payday. In the mean time, there’s a practical take-away from this article. If you want to recycle right now, you’re better off placing your recyclables on the ground, next to the bins designed to hold them.







Sincere thanks to our friend 陈立雯 at the Nature University Fund for enlightening us with her insight and knowledge. Nature University is an NGO that focuses on pollution issues, conservation and eco-education. Click here to see a short video they produced highlighting the lives of Junkmen. A version with English subtitles is available here (requires VPN).

This has been the first in a series of deep dives conducted by the Peking University Guanghua School of Management MBA program. At Peking University, we emphasize that business in China is more than just management skills. Explore. Discover. China. Learn more at mba.pku.edu.cn/english or read our brochure. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN and Instagram.

Photos courtesy of the Guanghua School of Management, bj.wenming.cn, ornets.cn, Getty Images