Cap or no cap, they’ll take it in China
To the editor:
Resource recovery is a major industry here in China. I love junk. Give me a yard sale on a nice summer day and I am hip deep in perusing the collection of castoffs in hopes of finding yet one more item to add to the collection.
As I walk from my apartment to the Metro station it is easy to see how little gets wasted here. You have your bottle and can people, your cardboard people, your paper people, and even your plastics people.
If you finish your bottle of soda and toss it away with the cap on it will survive for about three minutes. Someone will take it, flatten it and tuck it away. It is income. Unlike the silly issue of capped or not capped, all bottles sold in China must be completely recoverable. Never could understand that you had to take the caps off the bottles before recycling. Probably some one just wanting to throw a wet blanket on industriousness.
Much of what is now for sale has to meet recycling requirements. Building sites swarm with hundreds of workers who do nothing but collect the debris and sell it for a few Kuai at the end of the day. Kuai is street vernacular for the RMB, the currency of China.
When a new business moves into a building, the interior is stripped down to the concrete and heaped outside. Within hours, the broken shelves, glass, and concrete dividers are heaped in small piles and placed in sacks. Often, it takes no more than a couple of days for the rubbish to disappear into the maze of resource recovery efforts that form part of the business chain in China. There is always someone who will pay for some sort of material if it can be brought together in quantity. It forms part of the social security net that keeps China afloat.
The bottles, cans, bits of paper and plastic are the extra cash that people use to make life a little more comfortable. As I walked past one street corner, the local rag and bone man was busy slitting open juice boxes and separating the plastic liner from the aluminum foil. Tedious and an offense to the olfactory system, he would only get a few pennies for that work. Judging from the pile of separated pieces beside him, he was making it pay. His office is a street corner. His business card a hand-lettered sign on a tattered piece of cardboard.
I dropped my bag of materials beside him and in seconds he was sorting it out. Some grunting and gesturing, my broken Chinese resting on a few number words and I had five RMB. He had a fortune and a smile.
Orpheus Allison, MLA
Guangzhou, China
orpheusallison@mla.com
