The 2026 World Cleanup Day global event is being held in Shaoxing, east China's Zhejiang Province, from September 19 to 21. September 20 marks World Cleanup Day, with this year's theme focusing on the transition from reducing food waste to building cleaner cities.

The event's global main venue is being held in China for the first time.

Food waste is a major part of the global environmental challenge. According to the UN Environment Programme's Food Waste Index Report 2024, an estimated 1.05 billion tonnes of food was wasted globally in 2022 across households, food services and retail. That accounted for about 19% of food available to consumers, while food loss and waste were responsible for an estimated 8-10% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

In Shaoxing, efforts to reduce waste have started at the community level, including in schools.

At a school in the city, leftover food is weighed every Wednesday, with the data compared monthly across grades and classes. In one sixth-grade class, food waste fell from 10.1 kilograms in March 2026 to 6.7 kilograms in April.

The school has also introduced measures such as different meal options and seasonal menus to reduce waste at the source.

The effort extends beyond schools. In some rural communities, local authorities have promoted more economical wedding banquets by optimizing menus and encouraging less wasteful practices. These measures have reduced food waste from banquet ingredients by an average of 25%, according to the information provided.

Shaoxing has also expanded its efforts from food waste reduction to waste sorting and resource recycling.

The city has built nearly 4,500 designated household waste collection points with standardized facilities. Its upgraded waste-sorting supervision platform can automatically identify problems such as overflowing bins and improper waste disposal in 2,258 residential communities. It can also issue alerts for littering and improper mixed collection or transportation involving 1,161 waste collection vehicles.

Nationwide, China's Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development said that by the end of 2025, household waste sorting had basically achieved full coverage in residential communities in 297 cities at the prefecture level and above. The country had 1,137 waste-to-energy facilities, with a daily treatment capacity of 1.18 million tonnes.

Fifteen provincial-level regions, including Beijing, Zhejiang and Shandong, had achieved zero landfill of untreated household waste.

China aims to raise the national urban household waste resource utilization rate to more than 76% by the end of 2030.