Page 94 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

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sorting centres equipped with automatic processing machines. In order to
promote the upgrading of the urban recycling industry from the dirty and
labour-intensive business of rag picking to a clean and efficient industry the
municipal government established a special fund to support formal recy-
cling companies in upgrading their equipment and enhancing their control
over the whole recycling chain.
However, this optimized logistic system still found it difficult to com-
pete effectively with the informal sector. Waste electronics is a prime
example. The informal system, composed of peddlers in residential com-
munities, mobile collectors and informal disassemblers in waste villages,
such as Bajia and Dongxiaokou, at the rural-urban fringe, enjoy important
advantages over the formal system for several reasons. First, the ped-
dlers working in residential communities provide households with a
door-to-door service, which is more convenient to customers. Second,
their transportation tools are flexible and able to fit different conditions.
Because peddlers in residential communities use tricycles for household
collection they can reach out-of-the-way places in the urban sprawl of high
density housing without incurring fuel costs. There are many mobile col-
lectors who ride around communities and buy products from residential
community peddlers. This decentralised, multi-level system, moves dis-
carded products from dispersed households to markets very efficiently.
Thirdly, the processing of used goods is also more flexible. Some discarded
products are refurbished and sold to rural residents and poor migrants, and
those that cannot be reused are sorted and disassembled during trans-
portation. Fourthly, the materials are sold outside Beijing for further
processing. Finally, the automatic capital-intensive sorting equipment is
inefficient compared with the labour-intensive sorting of waste villages.
Additionally, through the whole process, the informal sector pays no
transaction taxes giving them a further cost advantage.

Waste as Wicked

The effort to rebuild the recycling system to replace the informal sector has
therefore by and large been in vain. On the one hand, the formal system is
increasingly evolving towards a capital intensive waste management system
with expensive technical solutions and even though the government is
willing to pay the cost of implementation, by founding facilities for
example, these projects face a growing number of NIMBY movements
protesting the arrival of waste management facilities in their ‘backyards’.