Week 4: Notes from Mr. Yan’s Talk + Installation

Notes from Mr. Yan’s Talk

Types of trash

• Residual
• “Wet” trash/household waste
• Recyclables
  • General rule: if the plastic container is clear it is usually good to be recycled
• Toxic trash

Process

• 5:30am: residual trash truck comes to collect residual trash from the previous night
• Mr. Yan then cleans the trash cans before they are opened at 7am
• 12pm: recyclables collection
• 6-8pm: usual trash collection time from residents
• Afterwards: he sorts and sells the trash, usually finishing his day around 10:30pm
  • As a regular, he can sell at around 0.8RMB/hour, though this price fluctuates. This year it has dropped to 0.6 because of government environmental campaigns so a lot of facilities were shut down

Differences after new trash sorting laws

• There is a lot less trash that has to be sorted, and everything is much cleaner
• He doesn’t have to buy trash from residents, though some Shanghainese families still call him to buy their trash for him to sort
• However, there are still some people who are not following the rules. These people are usually a few Shanghainese families that consistently don’t listen
  • 3 strikes system: take a photo of the person after they break the rules 3 times and submit the photo
• Mr. Yan used to be able to go pick through trash cans but now a lot of these bins have been locked up and can only be accessible at certain hours
• The government pays 8RMB an hour for people to stand by the trash bins (but this is only in Shanghai…new laws have not been implemented across China)

Other Notes

• Friday and Saturday are good business days.
  • Sundays and holidays are not
• More city development = more opportunity to collect recyclables
• Biggest worry = running into police while on a cart with trash
  • The police will take the cart and disassemble it, and you have to pay a lot of money to get it fixed
  • Really isn’t a way to work around this, except to be very careful and go at night when police are getting off of work…then you will likely get a 100RMB fine instead, which is cheaper than having to repair the cart

 

Art Installation

For our installation, we decided to create a comedic video to encourage people to properly dispose of their waste. By introducing a little bit of humor, it was our hope for Sofia’s character in the video to be memorable each time someone goes to throw something away in the cafe.

One point that is especially important in the video is when our friend Matt tries to throw a used napkin away in the recyclables bin when it should in fact go into the residual bin. This is a common misconception about sorting that Mr. Yan brought up in his talk as well as one that I was personally previously guilty of doing.

The question now is how to display the video. There are multiple screens that can be found around campus, but it would be ideal for it to be placed somewhere in a place that generates a lot of waste or where you would normally throw things away, such as in the cafe.