Ka-ming Wu and Jieying Zhang

Beijing, the capital city of China, is well known for its Forbidden City museum, the Great Wall, and its cosmopolitan urban development.  Beijing is much less known for its alarming level of waste production and the whereabouts of its waste. With a population of 20 million people, and an intense level of consumption and economic activities, the amount of municipal waste produced daily in Beijing has reached more than 20,000 tons in 2016. It is therefore not an exaggeration to say that Beijing is “besieged by waste” and that waste management has become a major headache for the city government.

While this large amount of municipal waste, which ends up in landfills and incineration plants, is enormous enough, few people know that such waste has already been carefully processed and significantly reduced by an invisible group. This group is the waste pickers, exclusively composed of rural migrants from poorer parts of Sichuan and Henan provinces. The unofficial estimate of the number of waste pickers in Beijing alone is over one hundred thousand. This number was much larger when the global prices of raw materials were higher.  Unlike those in Mumbai and Manila, waste pickers in Beijing do not live on landfills. They are itinerant traders roaming urban spaces. Every morning, an army of waste pickers arrives at hundreds and thousands of residences, office buildings, shopping malls and hotels to reach the source of post-consumption discards. Many transport their “harvest” by peddling on bicycle-drawn carts. Some are able to save time and energy with trucks. The “harvest” typically is unloaded at their rented living quarters which have open space courtyards, located in “urban villages” off the sixth ring of the city. After spreading out their loads on courtyards, waste pickers sort out the valuable recyclables: plastic and glass bottles, newspaper, clothing, shoes, cardboard, foam, electronics, furniture, toys, plastic bags, plastic tools, miscellaneous wood and all kinds of metals. The most sought after waste items are metals, which sell at better prices than others. Those waste pickers who are able to make deals with construction sites gain access to some. Those who do not have any business deals perform extra steps to extract cooper from plastic wrapped cables or other electronic products.

Waste pickers collect, sort and process discarded waste on a daily basis. Their work involves not only intense labor input and commitment to endure a polluted living and working environment, it also involves an entrepreneurial mind and skills to maximize the profit margins out of hundreds and thousands of plastic bottles and soda cans. They exert an enormous amount of labor in the process. If riding a three-wheeled bicycle with a cart filled with discards that weighs up to a hundred kilograms for two hours is backbreaking, the loading and sorting process in an open space is equally arduous, especially in Beijing’s extremely hot summers and cold winters. Male waste pickers often engage their wives to do the sorting together in order to be time and cost effective.  The labor of sorting is physically very demanding as it involves a lot of breaking, squeezing, and pulling objects apart. It can also be dangerous as there are glass and sharp objects. Apart from the smell of rotten food waste and fetid liquid running everywhere, the major concern of these courtyard spaces is untreated pollutants. Yet in order to guard and store their piled-up recyclables, waste pickers often live in simple brick sheds within the same courtyard space. The arrangement of living with waste helps waste pickers not only to save the costs of living in the city, it also provides them with secured spaces for accumulating their recyclables, ready to be sold to factories located in neighboring Hebei Province or provinces even further away. The downside of this arrangement is that it attracts stigmatization towards the work and identity of the group.

If one looked at the city from high above with a drone camera, one would see that the modern Chinese capital is literally surrounded by rings of “urban villages.” These urban villages used to be rural villages and farmlands. They have for the last several decades been slowly developed into patchy spaces of small factories, migrant workers’ dormitories, landfills, and what we call “waste courtyards,” (feipin changzi) alongside of dwindling farmlands.  One would be seeing a lot more landfills surrounding the capital city and more serious pollution of all kinds, if it had not been for the work of waste pickers over the last several decades.

Recyclables piled up in a “waste courtyard” in Beijing. Photos courtesy Ka-ming Wu and Jieying Zhang.

Recyclables piled up in a “waste courtyard” in Beijing. Photos courtesy Ka-ming Wu and Jieying Zhang.

The labor and contribution of waste pickers in Chinese megacities is seldom acknowledged.  The majority of urbanites ignore them as either dirty rural migrants or petty traders. The government sees no needs to quantify this groups’ economic contribution to the city’s GDP. Perhaps the most overlooked aspect is the group’s contribution to waste reduction in the city. There are no statistics counting how much the group has contributed to reducing the burden on city landfills and incineration plants. Invisible in both official data and urban public spaces, waste pickers’ labor and their arrangements to live with waste have significantly alleviated the situation of waste besieging the city.  In fact, the labor of waste pickers has in effect replaced or displaced individual and government responsibility to sort waste at household and municipal levels. The ability for waste pickers to reduce waste in Chinese megacities is nevertheless based on several conditions. First, a serious rural-urban divide in which rural migrants are eager to find urban opportunities is one underlying factor. Second, the fact that China is a major receiving country in the international waste trade (Alexander and Reno 2014) means that thousands of factories specializing in processing and recycling wasted materials from more developed countries are already in place. The existing infrastructure of waste trading allows waste pickers to plug in and profit from this lucrative business. The last condition is, of course, the enormous amount of waste generated in megacities such as Beijing.

Many items remain unable to be recycled. Food waste, plant matter and used batteries are destined to go to the landfill.  At the same time, as the global prices for waste products have plunged in recent years, more waste pickers are losing money in the waste business and many are leaving the industry. News reports are saying that even veteran waste traders now have big headaches selling their recyclables.  The global prices of raw materials are not only affecting the livelihoods of millions of wastes pickers living on the margins of Chinese megacities. The prices are also directly determining the rate at which waste, both from domestic consumption and imported from outside of China, will be turning into more landfill surrounding China’s cities.

This is the fourth short piece in a series of five which are focused on the generativity of waste and its various modalities of power in contemporary China and Taiwan. The series provides a follow-up to the panel “Living through Waste and Waste as Lively” presented November 21, 2015 at the 114^th American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado.

Ka-ming Wu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Jieying Zhang is Assistant Professor in the Institute of Sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Wu and Zhang are authors of the Chinese book Feipin Shenghuo: lajichang de jingji, shequn yu kongjian (Living with Waste: Economies, Communities and Spaces of Waste Collectors in China) published by the Chinese University Press in 2016.

Bo Wang

Yubeng Village, Nested in an eastern Himalayan valley, attracted more than 100 visitors daily during its warmer months from May to October, photo by author, 2012.

The Tibetan Village Yubeng, nestled deep in the Eastern Himalayan mountains, accidentally gained global fame for its pristine snow mountain peaks and its location that is considered home for deities by 140 Yubeng villagers and numerous Tibetan culture enthusiasts domestic and abroad. A phenomenal tiny place being made on the global stage, the story of Yubeng feeds on a global fascination with “Shangri-La,” the Chinese state’s plan of developing its western frontiers, and a romanticized “ecological” and “original” (yuan sheng tai) Tibetan environment juxtaposed with a polluted China. However, the explosion in numbers of tourists, from dozens per month to nearly a hundred per day during the recent decade, posed a serious ecological challenge: plastic wastes on the sacred mountain paths. If one gets lost in the mountain paths, which isn’t unusual, one only needs to follow the plastic—utensils, energy bar wrappers, portable oxygen cans—in order to get back on track. Due to the unpaved mountain paths unable to connect Yubeng to modern waste processing facilities, local inhabitants have to live with the presence of plastic wastes. The current practice is to collect them, bag them, and wait for transportation by mule and donkey, which is costly and slow. While bursting numbers of tourists shows the rapid pace of development, the persistence of plastic wastes is a constant reminder of the growing environmental impact. The case is an example of the “slow violence” faced by many indigenous people whose material and spiritual worlds are being disrupted by market forces and their remnant wastes worldwide. Plastics, in particular, cause problems in Tibet including polluted headwaters, cattle deaths, and even contamination along a sacred pilgrimage where plastic waste threatens to engulf spiritual objects made of wood, paper, or cloth.

Why study Yubeng? The strategy of developing a tourism economy in the Tibetan Autonomous Region is widely adopted by various levels of local government from townships to provincial levels, which consequently goes together with the Chinese state’s strategy of highlighting green GDP when governing its ethnic and religious borderlands. Yubeng exemplifies this scheme. First, the prefecture head who spearheaded this tourist transformation starting a decade ago now has become the Mayor of Lhasa, working to deepen the strategy of development for the sake of stability. Second, while the special visa that foreigners need to access Tibet is difficult to attain—the waiting period ranges from a couple of days to a few months—Yubeng, in a province neighboring Tibet, has become attractive as the second best candidate. In the tense geopolitics between Tibet and China where Beijing asserts Tibet as part of China, the case of Yubeng appears as a mutually beneficial relationship between religious villagers and secular developers.

Yet the presence of plastic waste has challenged the whole development scheme. On multiple levels, including environmental, economic, and religious, discarded plastics disturb notions of progress, improvement, and even freedom in state discourse. For villagers who have no choice but to adapt quickly to new requirements in hotel management, tourism means a different way of life. While most villagers adapt well, some have to give up their family houses where many generations of ancestors lived. Rewarded in cash from rents, they seek new dwellings and eventually a new life elsewhere. What is an appropriate way to think of such displacement? My fieldwork in 2011, 2012, and 2014-15 recorded the change in lifestyle in relation to wastes: from very little waste to plastic waste overload. All of this happened in a short time. How do people make sense of this change?

Nyima, in his mid-50s, became an environmental activist because he wanted to put his deep knowledge of mountain deities and folklore stories about them to good use; that is, by giving back to his family and friends in the village. He helped edit several books, made numerous presentations, and even produced a film documenting the local cultural change. He found his work gradually amounted to a kind of environmental activism. Stories of deities, as told by his elders, became extremely important, not for tourists’ entertainment, but for a spiritual and ecological curriculum that would benefit all. Deities feed on incense and offer protection against natural disasters and tragedies in life. His earlier involvement in the prefecture government’s project to create stories written on billboards in various languages taught him that interactive methods were best. Back then, he wished to build a larger project of tourism to imitate what he learned about Native American museums based on a fieldtrip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2009.

Plastic wastes piled up in the sacred mountain paths alongside lung ta—prayer flags hanging at various locations where deities travel, photo by author, 2015.

Now he has changed his thinking after seeing the persistence of plastic wastes. The conundrum lies in the increase of tourist revenues and Tibetan spirituality fading from the landscape. When the mountain deities are out of reach, people forget what an animated the environment we had before,” he commented on the mounting plastic wastes alongside lung ta, Tibetan prayer flags. In 2014-15, he helped to distribute free bamboo sticks to visitors as they entered sacred mountain paths, so that they would not need plastics or metal sticks, nor would they break branches off the trees, as before. He also helped his uncle, in his 70s, to self-publish a book of collected poems about deities that people used to chant as they walk on the paths. To him, the action of re-sacralization will benefit the “environmental” efforts of cleaning up the plastic wastes.

It cannot be emphasized enough the importance of paying attention to spiritual worlds as anthropologists analyze cultures and the environment following Roy Rappaport and others. Recent works, under the “ontological turn,” highlight indigenous worlds and world views to be of metaphysical significance. As my ethnography of plastic wastes on the sacred mountain paths here shows, not just anthropologists, but also people who collaborate with anthropologists in the field, are beginning to respond to the challenges of waste by turning to an introspection of and reviving their own spiritual worlds. They make films, publish books, and pursue new spiritual arts of living just as anthropologists of environment reach out to them and to the wider public with skills obtained in long-term engagements and well-articulated research.

This is the third short piece in a series of five which are focused on the generativity of waste and its various modalities of power in contemporary China and Taiwan. The series provides a follow-up to the panel “Living through Waste and Waste as Lively” presented November 21, 2015 at the 114^th American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado.

 Bo Wang is a PhD Candidate in cultural anthropology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. His dissertation is concerned with multilayered concepts of solid waste and the cultural work of waste in the context of spirituality, environmentalism, and tourism in Tibetan China. This research was supported by NSF and the Chiang Ching-kuo Fellowship.  

Adam Liebman

Since 2009, news outlets across China have repeated the mantra that “two-thirds of China’s cities face besiegement by garbage”—constituting a national crisis. Included is Kunming, the burgeoning capital of Yunnan Province. Yet, in addition to its propensity to “besiege”, proliferating waste matter has also generated economic opportunities for approximately 24 thousand rural migrants who make their living trading “waste-products” in the city.

Mobile waste-product buyers in Kunming stake out their territory in public spaces outside of residential areas or rows of shops. Their buying points shift over time, in rhythm with the city’s rapid pace of demolishing older residential neighborhoods and building new high-rises and shopping malls in their wake—i.e., the rapidly shifting geography of the city. Transporting goods is a crucial part of the business, and different types of vehicles are used for the task. Most common and emblematic are sanlunche, (bicycle-drawn carts, or more literally “three-wheeled bicycles”). The buyers who rely on sanlunche use their labor power to break waste-products down; sort, package, and load them up; and pedal their loads to larger scale buying points—trying their best to avoid harassment by the urban management bureau and traffic police as they navigate Kunming’s increasingly congested city streets. Although this work reduces the quantities of garbage left for the city to manage, while also consolidating and processing waste-products into raw materials for use in more legible forms of industrial production, the buyers are stigmatized for performing “informal” (bu guifan) or “illegal” business claimed to negatively affect “urban aesthetics” (shirong).

It should be emphasized that in Chinese language the terms “garbage” (laji) and “waste-product” (feipin) have significantly different connotations. The former is understood not just as “matter out of place” (Douglas 1966), but also as that which is without (commodity) value and thus cannot be sold. In contrast, the latter is understood as the material remnants of urban life which, although also seen as being disruptive of urban order, have been recovered from or avoided materializing as “garbage” through having a secondary value potential activated. Thus, in the contemporary Chinese city most “waste-products”, as particularly unpolished commodities, are not generated ready-made as such. Activating the potential exchange values of post-consumer wastes necessitates the attention, care, and labor of various urban inhabitants.

Kunming’s informal waste-product trade is largely contingent upon deeply engrained habits of thrift retained by a portion of the city’s inhabitants. These particular inhabitants tend to be older in age; they are often old enough to have lived through China’s socialist era, when the state attempted to elevate historically rooted practices of thrift, reuse, and recycling into moralized national imperatives (see Goldstein 2006). The “stewardship” with which these inhabitants handle everyday objects (Strasser 2000), including wastes, is vital to the functioning of the waste-product trade. If they did not meticulously save, break down, sort, and carry wastes to scrap traders, much of this excess matter would materialize simply as “garbage”. For, once individual pieces of waste are mixed together and discarded, they tend to pollute each other, lose their re-usability, and lose their potential to be transformed into “waste-products”.

The prices of waste-products, which fluctuate in response to global economic trends, play the most crucial role in keeping this informal economy moving. When prices are high, profits can be made, especially for buyers who possess the resources to take advantage; but when prices drop, the industry tightens. The latter has been the trend in recent years. The army of poor rural migrants who work as part of China’s informal waste-product industry shrunk by millions after the global economic crisis in the late 2000s, as waste-product prices plummeted. In 2014, Kunming’s waste-product buyers often told me that they were not even earning enough money to cover their rising living expenses. Yet, many remained in the sector, unable to find alternative means of living. One buyer commented to me that when urban residents hear the extent to which prices have dropped they often say “I might as well just throw my waste-products in the river and forget about them.” Thus, plummeting prices not only affect the migrant buyers, they also reduce the percentage of waste which gets diverted from the garbage stream. In turn, the “besiegement” crisis grows.

This growing crisis has led the city government in Kunming to embrace a new waste management strategy, one which is being both promoted and protested across China: incineration. Incineration plants utilize garbage as a raw material for the production of electricity, while also producing some particularly pernicious byproducts such as dioxins. According to official publicity, five recently built incineration plants in Kunming process 100% of the city’s garbage. Yet, the management at one incineration plant which I visited emphasized that the amount of garbage they receive from city sanitation trucks is too small. They worry that at current rates they will need over twenty years to recoup their investment and start to profit from selling electricity, and they blame the government for approving the construction of too many incineration plants. In other words, they complain that there is not enough garbage. The local state’s embrace of incineration is thus in direct conflict with the informal waste-product trading industry: the incineration plants have a vested interest in waste materializing as “garbage” and not being transformed into “waste-products”.

Incineration appears to perform a great trick by converting “garbage”, which in the growing field of “waste studies” is often taken to signify an antithesis of capital’s value form (Gidwani and Reddy 2011), into an object useful for industrial production and tied to prospects of future capital accumulation. Yet, the notion of converting waste to energy through utilizing “garbage-as-resource” conceals the fact that incineration generates bottom ash, fly ash, and other highly toxic pollutants. If the incineration coalition gets its way, mass consumption and “proper” waste disposal into the city’s waste infrastructure—which supplies hungry incineration plants—will continue to supplant thrift and a stewardship of objects, and the informal scrap trade will be pushed further into the margins of the city.

Adam Liebman is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at UC Davis. His dissertation fieldwork is focused on the evolving political ecology of waste-product trading in Kunming, China. This research was supported by grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the University of California Pacific Rim Research Program.

This is the first short piece in a series of five which are focused on the generativity of waste and its various modalities of power in contemporary China and Taiwan. The series provides a follow-up to the panel “Living through Waste and Waste as Lively” presented November 21, 2015 at the 114^th American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado.