Rubbish

Originally posted 7th April 2015

I’ve been meaning to write about rubbish in Shanghai for quite a while, but a spectacle we saw last night on our way back from the metro station made us laugh at the incongruity of it all.

Recycling “garage”

Our household rubbish is bagged up, unsorted by us and put in a topless swing top bin lined with a black sack on the staircase landing.  The rubbish is removed daily.  The rubbish for the whole compound of something like 400-500 flats must be collected in this way.  We believe that this is done by a family with two primary school children, who can sometimes be seen helping their parents.

Bags of rubbish from the apartments pile up throughout the day

The bags of rubbish are removed to a tall double-garage style building where piles of bags are usually piled up throughout the day.  But there is a recycling process going on here.  The family appear to have the rubbish franchise for the compound and recycle everything they possibly can.  So the rubbish is sorted and piled onto different electrically powered tricycles and removed, type by type.

Man sorting rubbish

Electric tricycles are used to move the rubbish

So all over the city you can see tricycles loaded with different types of rubbish:

Cardboard recycling

White Goods recycling

Anything that can’t be recycled around here seems to end up on a tricycle parked in the middle of the pavement on the Guyang Road about 1/2 km from our flat, making it difficult sometimes to walk along.  The tricycles are parked up waiting for their turn at the crusher, housed in a garage:

Unrecyclable rubbish

Crusher on Guyang Lu

The whole exercise, as you would expect, is tough grubby work and there are people of all ages and both sexes involved in this process throughout the city, no matter what the weather.  The old women involved appear to be as tough as old boots.  We admire the family at the bottom of our block and I feel sorry for them – they live behind, and possibly in part of, those buildings with the blue garage doors.

So last night, why were we laughing?  Well on our way into town yesterday I had noticed three or four electric tricycles piled high with about five suites of furniture.  It hadn’t occurred to me to take a photo even though they were 20m away from the Takashimaya Department store.  On our return later that evening, we had just walked past the Versace concession in the store and had been looking at the workmanship on Miu Miu leather handbags (ones that retail at around US$2000) in the shop window.  Richard had been flabbergasted when I told him how much such handbags are sold for (I’m a £30 from Tesco bag lady) and we’d been discussing how mad some women are – especially those ones who claim that if they buy an expensive handbag they will attract the right sort of man (I have yet to find a man who even notices that you have a handbag, let alone one who could tell the difference between a £30 one and a £1500 one, never mind what they would think of you if they found out that you thought such a purchase was a good idea).

And then we turned round and there was the debris from the sofa recycling and a man banging at pieces of wood with a hammer – not all of this recycling is done inside the grounds of a compound you see, even if it is in one of the more exclusive parts of town: