Xu Yannian has gotten up at six in the morning each day for many years, so he can be ready when the garbage truck comes at 6:30 to collect the trash from the community in Beijing where he handles rubbish disposal.
　　Xu manages the garbage room, an airtight, 50-square-meter space with more than 10 metal trash cans where residents in the community put their rubbish.
　　Next to the garbage room is a nine-square-meter room in which he lives. Xu is a migrant worker, and living in the little space saves him a lot of money on rent.
　　He said there are hundreds of such airtight garbage rooms in Beijing, specifically for collecting trash. As Beijing residents are not interested in doing this job, all the workers who manage the trash come from outside the city. Collecting the trash, assisting in its transfer and cleaning the garbage rooms are tasks that occupy these people every day.
　　At 6:30, as usual, the garbage truck arrives. It is sealed with thick iron sheeting and has an automatic arm that lifts garbage cans, inverts them to empty the trash into the truck and sets them down again. What Xu must do is to attach the cans to the mechanism in sequence and then remove them after the process is completed.
　　Xu said the driver works for the Beijing No.2 Sanitation Group, one of three such units in the Chinese capital, which sends six trash trucks each day to transport garbage from southern and western parts of the city to the Majialou trash station in south Beijing for preliminary classification.
　　According to Beijing Municipal Government regulations, the city’s trash must be processed daily. Beijing generates 11,500 tons of garbage a day, and the No.2 Sanitation Group handles almost a quarter of the city’s total.
　　
　　Processing the trash
　　
　　SMALL HAND, BIG MOVE: A little girl learns to distinguish cans for different categories of garbage when visiting a park. Raising public awareness of garbage classification is considered key to Beijing’s “clean city” campaign
　　After collecting rubbish from another garbage room, the truck proceeds to the Majialou station. Workers there weigh the trash and then unload it to a warehouse, where it is sorted.
　　The trash is moved on a conveyor belt in the warehouse to a screening workroom, where it is classified according to size: above 60 mm in diameter, 15-60 mm and below 15mm. Trash bigger than 60 mm is put into a container where it is compressed. Waste such as metal and paper smaller than 60 mm is moved along another conveyor belt, where a magnetic device above the belt removes the metal for recycling.
　　The rest of the trash is sorted to pieces smaller than 15 mm, which are sent along another conveyor belt.
　　The garbage is placed in different containers to be shipped for further treatment. Trash between 15 and 60 mm is sent to the Nangong composting plant, while both larger and smaller pieces are sent to the Anding plant to be buried.
　　Landfill is the main way Beijing deals with its garbage. Currently, 89.6 percent of trash is buried, 5.8 percent is composted and 4.6 percent, mostly medical waste, is incinerated.
　　At present, 94 percent of the garbage is treated to the point where it is environmentally harmless, but the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau said the goal is to reach 96 percent this year, 97 percent in 2007 and 98 percent in 2008.
　　Beijing has established complete garbage treatment and management systems in most of the inner eight districts and outlying satellite towns. Eighteen garbage disposal establishments have been set up, among which there are four large garbage transfer stations, nine large landfill sites, three composting plants and two incinerators, with a daily disposal capacity of 8,800 tons.
　　However, compared with the 11,500 tons of garbage Beijing generates each day, an amount that is increasing by 2 percent year on year, disposal capacity needs to be increased. By 2008, Beijing is expected to generate 12,000 tons of rubbish every day, for an annual output of 4.38 million tons. Medical waste is forecast to total 60 tons per day and kitchen waste will amount to 1,200 tons. This provides a tough test of Beijing’s garbage disposal capacity.
　　
　　New facilities in the works
　　
　　HANDLING WASTE ON SITE: A cleaner tosses kitchen waste into equipment that processes it. This new technology is being tested in a pilot program in 250 communities in Beijing
　　Liang Guangsheng of the Beijing Municipal Administra-tion Commission said this year and next year the city would totally invest 10 billion yuan in building garbage disposal facilities and it would employ a market-oriented management model.
　　One key project will be a plastic waste separation system at the Majialou garbage station, which will handle plastic bags. The plastic will be cleaned and compressed, and then sold back to enterprises.
　　This new separation system will be the second of its kind in Beijing. The first one was set up in the Xiaowuji garbage transfer station and has been operating for more than a year. Every day it can separate five to six tons of waste plastic bags from 1,000 tons of garbage. The plastic bags, which previously were buried along with other trash, can be sold at a price of 200 yuan per ton.
　　Construction has begun on the largest household trash disposal facility, the Asuwei Comprehensive Garbage Treatment Plant, with a total investment of 270 million yuan. It is expected that by 2007 Beijing will have a daily trash disposal capacity of 11,800 tons.
　　Beijing also has adopted a household trash on-site treatment program, which is in the pilot stage in 250 communities, including Xinwaidajie No.6 Community. About 1,000 families in the community generate over 1.5 tons of trash every day.
　　The trash is roughly sorted by the residents first. About 30 percent of the waste, which consists of recyclable items such as paper and plastic, is transported to a recycling station, but the remaining 70 percent, which includes food waste, wooden chopsticks, nut shells and even some tree branches or leaves, is processed in equipment that grinds and dehydrates the trash. It then becomes a powdery or granular organic fertilizer after decomposition and fermentation, which is used on flowers and grass.
　　It is reported that Beijing plans to set up another incinerator, two landfills and seven comprehensive disposal plants to meet its target for making trash environmentally safe.
　　Xu Yannian said the situation is already quite different from six years ago when he arrived in Beijing, since there no longer are places where garbage is piled up, and the city has become much cleaner. He believes it will be even tidier by the time the Olympics are held in 2008.

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