Page 92 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

78 X. TONG

migrants’ workers daily lives, on their struggle for living, and on their
contribution to the city and to resource recovery (Real-25-hour 2012).
The video also shows his effort to upgrade the recycling industry and
improve working conditions in Dongxiaokou. However, his publicity effort
did not stop the demolition of the market.

THE ILLUSORY “URBAN CIRCULAR ECONOMIC SYSTEM”

Since 2000, along with the demolition of waste villages, the municipal
government has been trying to rebuild the urban recycling system. This has
the aim of replacing the informal scavengers’ network with an extensive set
of community-based collection facilities covering all residential areas.
Several large-scale collection and sorting centres equipped with automatic
machines were planned to replace the dominant labour-intensive sorting
activities of the waste villages. However, the implementation of this plan
has confronted constant difficulties (Wang and Han 2008).

Community-Based Recycling: Social Approaches
In May 2000, nine administrative departments of the Beijing Municipal
government jointly launched an agenda for a pilot project establishing
community-based recycling systems. On the one hand, the project aimed at
rebuilding the urban recycling system in the inner-city. Five of the eight
inner-city districts of Beijing, Xicheng, Chaoyang, Haidian, Fengtai and
Xuanwu, were nominated as pilot regions. The actions included promoting
the standardization of the logos, transportation vehicles, workers uniforms,
prices and categories of recyclable goods, as well as measuring equipment
in the recycling sector. On the other hand, the government planned an
extensive network of community collection sites, each serving 1000–1500
households. More than 1800 sites were designated covering all the districts
of Beijing inner-city. The government also planned to build 10 formal
recycling markets before 2003. This scheme was supposed to cover 100%
of recyclable products in the five pilot districts, to regulate the uncontrolled
flows of rags and to reduce concentration of migrant workers in waste
villages.
This plan can be considered as an effort to rebuild a three-level recycling
system similar to the former centrally planned one. However, the emphasis
went far beyond resource conservation, and pursued the goal of producing
a neat and clean image for the urban Recycling sector. It imposed detailed