So my original research for over 20 years
really focuses on environmental policy and
environmental governance.
So I was looking at how
the pollution is controlled
on the ground of the environmental laws
and policies that were
passed by the government.
So, I was not looking at the
waste management until 2016
when I wanted to raise it to
my PhD friend from Stanford.
We both went to Stanford for a PhD program.
And that's when I discovered there are very
interesting things going on in Bangalore.
So, what happened is, when they were
frustrated with the waste crisis in 2012,
and they found the public interest in
litigation laws with a state court,
and had a court order which
means they were going to
mandate the entire city and focus
on the residents' responsibility,
which means they have to
take charge of their waste,
by separating waste at household level.
And they also implemented
a door-to-door collection
to ensure the quality of
separated waste is high.
Then, because of the NGO
citizen group involvement,
they managed to get the court
to pass an order to mandate,
they called “Bot Generators”.
Basically the residential area
with 50 households or more
to treat their food waste on
site within the residential area.
Right now they have over thousand
communities (are) doing the
onsite composting for the waste.
And there's a compost able to sell it
to the farmers and use it for gardening.
So, one of the major findings I
found in this one year project,
I set up later with a thesis
tackled in Bangalore India,
is they rule out the judiciary and court
play in this legal process
and implementation.
So, you really don't see, traditionally,
the role of the government agency
enforcing this law or court order.
It is really by citizens and NGOs,
they are pushing the implementation and
assisting the government enforcement.
So, we see this bottom-up approach
really focuses on decentralized
management of waste,
instead of like European
countries or US or Canada,
where they mostly centralized
the approach of waste disposal,
either by incineration and
non fuel..., and even the compost is
centralized mostly in those areas.
But in Bangalore, you see, is very
small scale, intimate with humans.
So you're talking about 50
kilograms per day of food waste
to several hundred kilograms a day.
So, it's small, but building the relationship
with the community and the people.
So, I think the NGOs and
courts in this process
play a role, which we
call bottom-up approach.
I don't see that very often in China.
So that's how I got
interested in this project.
So, we started with the separation in 2000.
So, it has been almost
16, 17 or 19 years now,
but it is really from
the top government
and they ordered and they wanted
the people to follow that,
and that never really happened.
But in the last 5 to 10 years
the environmental NGOs in China,
which is very small number of them,
but they started to push in, trying
out with individual communities, to see
if we could actually get the citizens
and residents to separate
waste at the household level.
And there are very interesting NGOs that
came up, like in Shanghai, called “Ifen”.
So, what did they do? They start
in 2012, they set up this company
that is more like a social enterprise.
It's more like an NGO, but
it's registered as a company.
So what they do is, they work with the
local, very bottom local level government
and working with the residents
and the residential committee.
And they too spend at least three
to six month to get the people
educated about the waste, how they separate
the waste and how to get it processed.
And, meanwhile, how the waste is
being treated after separated.
One thing I learned from them, is
building this coalition within
a complex or residential area,
make sure people buy into this idea.
So they have been trying this
for almost seven, eight years.
So that's something we see in the
last five, ten years in China.
It's in small numbers,
but they had successful
experience at the local level.
And even though before 2018
they didn't go anywhere,
because it wasn't a big deal in China,
people are mostly landfilling their waste
and there's also incineration coming up.
But [there was] not so much focus on,
we call source separation of food,
of the waste.
So, those NGOs in China,
they started to push in and try to
build up the successful experience.
One thing that I found really
interesting about them is,
they work with one and
another communities and small,
and they try to communicate the experience.
But the problem was, well, they had an
example, right? They had a successful
experience. But how to
take it to the government?
So you want a government to
buy into this idea,
so that the government would pass a
law or policy to get it implemented.
Until 2018 they didn't go anywhere.
But again, this is a top
approach, top-down approach,
so when the central government decided
that Xi Jinping came out
to say something about,
we need to have the waste separation.
So, Chinese called it“垃圾分类是很重要的”
So, it's all about the separation.
But that problem is the
same as in Bangalore.
The government didn't know what to do,
they only knew they wanted to do that.
But they had no idea how to do it.
So, this time, at this point,
those successful experiences built
by all those NGOs came to play.
Shanghai is a perfect example.
Like Shanghai this year,
actually on July 1st,
they are going to have a
city-wide mandatory separation.
And they have all those
local volunteers going around
to make sure people are
separating their waste.
And that model is built upon “Ifen”,
this local social
enterprise I just mentioned.
Because they have over 300
residential committees,
they had some sort of source
separation of the waste
and they helped to build
it in the last eight years.
And so I think even though the
situation is much different in India
because we have a much stronger government,
but still, there is room,
like a very small room, but there
is a room for NGO participation.
And waste management happens to
be not very sensitive issues.
So, there we see, NGOs are playing a
role, although quite certificateless.
So, that's the hope I hold for China.
If we have anything for sustainable
development, it is this bottom-up approach.
They find there's a little way into the
governmental part of policymaking when the
opportunities arise.
So, in my view that's why I
support NGOs, I sit on their board.
Because I saw their potential.
They are pushing, pushing
until the opportunity arises
and you're getting in there.
So you do see that in
China, not very often,
but at least in waste
management we did see that.
Okay, the ban on the waste import.
I happen to be involved
many years ago, about five, ten years ago.
I can't quite remember.
My friend used to be in charge of this
at the Ministry of Environmental
Protection in China,
and she basically send me a bunch of papers
and said, can you look at the problems.
So there are bunches of carts imported
from, I can't remember the country,
and stopped at one of the ports.
And because what's the problem?
The problem is,
it looks perfectly fine from outside,
it's a big cart, it's huge,
like several tons per cart.
But once they open that, actually,
inside is all mix of waste.
They claimed it to be plastic
or paper or cardboard,
but when they open that big tank,
and instead there is mixed
and very filthy waste.
And they had no way to
detect that before the
import actually really cross the border,
and after that it has already
passed the examination.
Because checking every cart was impossible.
So at that point, I
remember, I asked my friend,
because I never did any
research on waste at that point.
So I asked her, I said, why
were you importing those things?
And then she said, you know what,
we are short of these resources.
And they separate really well,
from Germany, from Japan, and some
are actually from Southeast Asia.
And they do really well, because
we don't separate our waste.
There's a mess.
That's why we import from other countries.
This has been going on for many years.
Then, at that point, I realized, you
know, we didn't do any separation.
And so I think, once China banned that,
for domestically, in a
way particalary plastic,
we don't have enough
recyclable plastic for reuse.
It's actually challenging.
We need, I can't remember the
exact number,
 but somewhere between 70 to 90%
of these waste recyclable plastics
to back to the industry.
And we don't have good
quality of separated plastic.
So, when we ban the import, actually,
for that particular sector, we
are more or less in trouble.
So, they are working really hard on this.
That's why I think, that's
another reason probably.
They are really pushing
for source separation.
And the question, the issue is, once you
promote separation at the household level,
you not only increase
the quantity of the waste,
like plastic, paper and metal
that could have been reused,
you also improve the quality,
because none of these
things has been contaminated
by the wet waste or food waste,
or what we call organic waste.
Then the quality and quantity
[are] both increased.
So, I would say this is
something we'll really
kind of see happen in China, because
of the ban of the import of waste
pushing the government and
also the local government
to do more about waste separation.
But I heard, I didn't
do any research on that,
that this ban actually put
pretty a hard time on some of the
countries, like Bangladesh, I heard.
They used to export a lot to
China, all of a sudden it stopped.
And so they accumulate [but]
they have nowhere to sell
and so they had a hard time.
So it is going to be challenging for
countries that used to sell to us.
And also it's going to be
challenging for Chinese also,
because at this point
they really needed to get
hundreds of millions of Chinese
to separate their waste.
Because we do need
a separated high quality of
this waste, actually for reuse.
Like in Japan, I remember I talked
about one of the Japanese scholars
who actually was not so
concerned about the ban
on the waste export from Japan,
because they have such a high
quality of the separated waste
like plastic and the
metal and the card board.
Those are really good
quality because Japan uses
good materials to produce those products,
And once those are used,
because of the good materials,
the waste becomes of good quality, right?
So they are not so concerned about
exporting those things to other countries.
Because there are demands
for those [waste].
If you separate it, and good quality,
and any country would want that,
because reuse actually
costs less resources, right?
You protect your environment.
So, I would say this is challenge for
everybody, because China had such huge
import of the waste. But it is good,
particularly I'm talking about
decentralized waste management.
You shouldn't send you waste
to other countries anyway.
It's time to push those developed
countries to rethink about their approach.
They have been mostly focusing
on a centralized approach.
Now you got to do something locally,
reduce the transportation
that would bring the secondary
pollution, and also costs more energy.
And also you reduce the
air and water pollution.
And you increase the ratio of
the waste being used locally.
So it's economically and environmentally
a sound approach for any country, anyway.
And also, if you focus on the
community level you [are] really
building people's relationship.
as the society becomes
increasingly individualized
and the society, in a way, is so segmented.
Now you actually bring them together
through this decentralized approach.
So I think that is a good
thing, actually, in many ways.
And everybody has to change or the countries
have to adopt these different policies
and approaches to deal with that.
And in the end, I think it would be good
for humans and also for the environment.
