SLAS Times Q2 2019-2020 SLAS Times: Fall 2019 | Page 40

Sort trash or pay cash
by Nikolay Mesropyan
environment.”
A junior student, Kyle Gumangan, said, “I find this
policy successful in this school because the students
fear that they will pay the large fine so with the con-
cern, they try to obey the policy.”
How It Works
There are four categories of trash: household food
waste, recyclables, residual waste, and hazardous
waste. Household food waste goes in the brown gar-
bage can, and the category includes food leftovers,
expired food, and fruit peels.
A
new garbage sorting policy was implemented by
the Shanghai city government at the beginning of
the 2019 summer season. Everyone in a building or
compound has to know how to sort trash precisely,
or else they will receive a 50,000 RMB fine.
At the end of the 2019 school year, wildcat house
system coordinator Alex Brown went to every class
and gave a test about the different types of garbage,
asking questions like, “how do you sort a can of Co-
ca-Cola with some in it?”
The waste is discarded at landfills or incinerators.
Shanghai currently has five incineration plants in op-
eration, with a total treatment capacity of 8,300 tons
per day.
The blue garbage can, for recyclable garbage, is for
clean paper, cans, glass, and fabrics. Recycling saves
additional energy that manufacturers would use pro-
ducing new products from scratch. It also reduces
the amount of material going into lWandfills.
The residual garbage can is for plastic bags, tissues,
The policy started to help clean the environment be-
and all other trash that is not recyclable. It is the black
cause there was too much garbage on the sidewalks
garbage can. Shanghai is burning all the residual and
and roads.
wet waste, which comprises about 80% of the city’s
total garbage.
According to Mr. Brown, “It is obviously really import-
ant for the environment. China, for example, doesn’t
The red garbage can is for hazardous waste, includ-
deal with environmental issues particularly well.
ing batteries, light tubes, medicine, and all electronic
Trash is the latest thing they improved on. It is good
waste.
that they’ve done it, and hopefully, it’ll improve the