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Nearly a month into an environmentally-friendly policy in Shanghai, ask residents there how to classify waste into residual, household food, recyclable and hazardous, and they might surprise you. They have become sorting masters. Taking things apart, sorting and disposing different waste into four bins respectively.
Do you know what category of garbage this belongs to? /CGTN Photo
CGTN met Max Mou and Janice Tong. Like many young couples today, they order take-out food more than they cook. With Shanghai's new garbage-sorting rule, dealing with these lunchboxes and leftovers is quite a challenge: what should go where?
The "trouble" starts after the feast. /CGTN Photo
"We got into a lot of arguments every day," said Max. "You remember you left a big bowl in the household food waste, and I was caught by a volunteer lady," Janice said in the interview.
There are about 30,000 garbage sorting volunteers across all major communities in the city. They are retirees with rigorous eyes for any sorting mistakes, helping residents stick to the rule.
"You know the lady is always picking bones with us, literally bones," said Max. "So at first, we thought all the bones belonged to residual waste but...no. Basically mainly they are household food waste. But for the big parts, they should be residual waste."
The couple is playing a garbage sorting themed card game, and they've been practicing for two months to get better at sorting. /CGTN Photo
The couple says that for the sake of the environment it is worth the hassle. "In the last decade, we didn't think too much about waste processing. That's because others would do the job. But now we should take more responsibility in the community," said Max.
The new rule has changed people's habits in more ways than most imagined at first. Just a week after it went into effect, requests to not have disposable chopsticks delivered with food on China's biggest food delivery app has more than doubled in Shanghai.
Now that the government has set specific time slots for garbage disposal, taking out the trash has become somewhat ceremonial. "If I'm working late, my boss won't let me go, because she won't believe that I want to catch up with the deadline of the sorting time," said Max.
They are two of the 24 million Shanghai residents now going through the same process: from confused about garbage selection to make it a habit. The couple says these few months will be an interesting time to look back a few years in the future.