Thinking about the Logistics of Dealing with a Billion People (and their garbage)

The sheer scale of China boggles my mind sometimes.  There are as many people in Beijing as there are in Canada, and Beijing isn't even China's largest city.  Xi'An (where I started writing this entry) has a population between 6-8 million, easily beating Canada's top two cities combined (and possibly the top 3), and Xi'An is barely average size in China.  (Kunming, where I am now, is almost as big.  It's China's 16th largest city.)

Food here consists of mainly noodles, veggies and rice.  (Mainly noodles here in Xi'An, which has a rich noodle culture.)  Meals tend to have very little meat, and when they do it can drive up the cost of the meal very quickly.  For example veggie jiaozi (12 RMB) vs lamb baozi (18 RMB) with addition of only a small amount of meat, and regular biang biang mian (15 RMB) vs "special" (25 RMB) again with only a small amount of meat added.  A steak dinner will set you back at least 100 RMB, partly because this is a meal aimed at foreigners, but mainly because the meal includes a huge hunk of meat.  It's much more expensive, energy intensive, and just plain takes longer to raise a piece of meat than to grow a crop of vegetables, and the need to feed a billion people is just going to price that sort of food right out of the market.

I've mentioned before, every scrap of land is used for something, and much of it is growing crops.  On the train ride from Beijing to Xi'An I observed a significant portion of the land given to agriculture, and even in tiny Dengfeng locals had taken over small scraps of land for growing food:

In Kunming they're even growing food on Dianchi Lake (if you can't see clearly, the stilts support nets that are growing seaweed):

Back in Canada we're used to seeing big trucks delivering beer, produce, goods, whatever to stores and restaurants.  In China the delivery mechanism consists mainly of bicycles and trailers:

Some are motorized but a large number are just pedal power.  These things are continually making small deliveries to the many small groceries and eateries around town.  And also sorting and picking up the garbage.  There are no giant garbage trucks rumbling through in the middle of the night, here it's a continuous process.

Notice that they separate bottles, cardboard and other recycleables at the source.

This is the biggest garbage truck I've seen, collecting bins from an office building.

In fact the scale of everything here is surprisingly small (for the most part) - stores are small, most restaurants are just small holes-in-the-wall (here they say "fan guanr") or street vendors, delivery and garbage pick-up is by bicycle.  Even what looks like a large store can actually consist of a bunch of small vendors under the same roof (as I found in Beijing when I almost walked off with  notebook).

The packaging on some of the manufactured food products is unreal.  Pretty much everything has wrapping within wrapping:

I opened a roll of candy, and found that it was double-packaged even though each candy was also individually wrapped.  I mean come on China.  With a billion people, this kind of thing adds up!

And the souvenirs favoured by Chinese tourists are of the plastic, throw-away variety (not like the classy bobblehead terracotta warriors coveted by us Western tourists).  All of this has to make it into a landfill somewhere right?

(Although I have to say some of this crap is pretty cool.  they have these little LED lights you catapult up in the air with  slingshot and they spiral back down to earth like little helicopters, about 50 cents each and very cool at night!)

Generally when you hear about pollution in China it's in relation to the air quality, and sometimes the water pollution or the contamination of the soil.  These are related mainly to industrial causes (factories releasing chemicals and pollution into the air and water), electricity generation (which in China is still mainly coal, although Xi'An has at least 2 giant nuclear stations in the vicinity, between the city and Hua Shan), and too many cars on the road. The closest I ever read about this kind of "trash" pollution was the story about 20,000 dead pigs being dumped into the river that provided Shanghai's water supply.  But from what I've seen, in Beijing and Xi'An anyways, the trash collection process seems to work fairly efficiently.

I think it starts with the fact that most Chinese don't eat most of the packaged, processed food you see in the supermarket.  This is what you see mostly in the street:

"Da bao" = "To go", food from a local street vendor tucked into a neat little plastic bag.  Most of the street vendor food is made from scratch, right in front of your eyes.  You can see them make the pastry, noodles, buns or whatever, cut the veggies, and cook it right in front of you.  It's a super efficient process, and I think Gordon Ramsey would be pleased.  Fresh local ingredients, local specialities, and a well-coordinated and efficient kitchen and service staff (of usually one or 2 people).  No kitchen nightmares here!

And then you see endless Chinese wandering around with their "da bao" lunch in little plastic baggies.

So that takes care of most of the packaging, and inefficiencies that are involved in manufacturing, transporting and packaging processed food.  The Chinese just don't seem to use as much of it!  At least per person. that I've seen.

I happened to stumble across a recycling district in the north part of Xi'An city, during one of my many walks.  This is where all the little bicycle collection trailers wound up after separating out the useful from the not from the cities trash.  There were small garages full of cardboard, scrap metal and whatnot, and an area with a group of people sorting bottles:

They were very amused at me taking pictures of their work.  One lady was standing in front of her pile of scrap metal with a fistful of cash, like she was running a little store and waiting for customers (which I suspect is exactly what she was doing).

But this is just the business of dealing with the trash in the downtown area.  What about all the giant apartment complexes?  Surely there's a much larger quantity f trash involved, and I don't recall seeing an army of bicycle trailers sorting and hauling trash anytime I was around one of those complexes.  I can't imagine those bicycle trailers handling the garbage from a large building complex, no matter how many of them.  I'll have to find out!  Inquiring minds want to know ...

(I'm staying with a Chinese family for the last 2 weeks of my vacation, in Guilin.  Expect an update on all of this as I "live the life" of  typical Chinese family!)