напиши в стиле абстракта к научной статье по данному тексту: A special report on waste Two worlds
Down in the dumps The poor world and the rich world face very
different problems with their waste Every morning just before 8am, a digger stretches
out its steel limb from the bank of the Chilliwong River in central Jakarta. It claws load upon
load of stinking rubbish from a barrier stretched across the stream and deposits it into the
back of an orange lorry. A city employee stands by, one of 5,000 people working in Pasukan
Oranya, orange teams, which dredge hundreds of tonnes of waste every day from the filthy
waterways of the Indonesian capital. A rag picker, treading precariously, sniffs for
plastic bottles and other recyclables. Once full, the lorry departs for Burkasi
landfill. There, amid more stench, dozens of waste pickers mill around beside the swinging
arms of the machines that unload the dripping rubbish. Their bounty is divided meticulously
and sold onto scrap dealers or reprocessing facilities. The remaining trash is rearranged
into landfill. In many parts of the developing world, formal
collection is expanding. There are now some 6,000 community waste banks in Indonesia, where
residents deposit recyclables in exchange for cash. Once rubbish makes it to the waste
management site, the systems can be relatively efficient. The problem is getting a nation's
refuse to such sites in the first place, when door-to-door collection is still rare and households
and businesses seldom sort their garbage. More than 14,000 kilometres from Jakarta,
in San Jose, California, trash is arriving at the Newby Island waste management plant.
As in most developed nations, getting it there is not the problem. Domestic and commercial
waste is collected from homes and offices efficiently. The difficulties start when the
rubbish arrives. With labour costs high, there are no rag pickers to sift through everything
and work out what is worth recycling. The problem here is in the sorting. Aluminium cans
are easy to deal with because they are all the same, but different types of plastics cannot
be recycled together and machines do not have the sophistication to tell one type from
another. So a lot goes to landfill or incineration, mixed with the remaining worthless waste.
And now, suddenly, China has stopped accepting imports of low-grade plastic and paper, so
Newby Island no longer has a place to send the mixed garbage that it lacks the hands
to separate. Both processes in the developed and the developing
world are part of a global system that has improved substantially in recent decades as
patterns of consumption and therefore waste disposal have changed. But both are under
strain as the volume of rubbish has increased with economic growth and as the global garbage
industry has changed. The improvements at Bokasi are part of a broader trend of developing
world governments, finally grasping that proper rubbish collection is more than just
keeping your streets smelling nice. It is a vital part of public health. Stinting on
rubbish means paying more for hospitals. Numerous studies have shown that life in areas with
patchy collection increases the risk of diseases as well as neurological conditions. In 2016
consultants at McKinsey calculated that burning, dumping or discharging a ton of rubbish into
waterways cost South Asian economies $375 through pollution and disease against $50 to
$100 required for basic systems to dispose of that same ton properly.
In the poorest countries, especially in Africa, rubbish is still just dumped anywhere and
management is limited. But there is also comparatively little of it. A typical citizen of Lesotho
produces 110 grams a day, one 40th as much as a typical citizen of Iceland, the country
with the highest rubbish generation rate per person. It is the economies that are booming
that present the challenge. Many are now pouring money into dealing with trash. Narendra Modi's
government has earmarked $9.5 billion for solid waste management in its $30 billion
swatch Bharat clean India mission. Indonesia is plowing $1 billion into its plastic clean
up campaign. Authorities in Morocco believe that $300 million they have invested in new
sanitary landfills has already averted $440 million in environmental damage. Many projects
enjoy backing from the World Bank and other multilateral lenders. Others are promoted by
grassroots organizations and entrepreneurs. They are bearing fruit. Collection rates in
low income countries have nearly doubled to 39% between 2012 and 2016, even as the volume
of waste rose by a third. In middle income countries like China, they rose on average
to 51%. Rates for industrial waste are also improving in places that have industry, though
they already tend to be high because factories produce large, predictable volumes of more
homogenous refuse that is often valuable like metal scrap. As collection has improved, so
has the next stage. China has emulated its rich Asian neighbors and embraced incineration.
The Chinese authorities scrapped plans for some plants in the face of protests by local
residents worried about air pollution. But they see incinerators as essential to tackling
what the World Bank predicts could be a 50% rise in China's solid waste by 2050. They are
trying to convince residents that incinerators are clean and safe, as modern ones are in
places like Taiwan, by for instance promoting school trips to facilities. The number of
incinerators in China has shot up from 57 in 2010 to more than 400. They now consume one
fifth of the 220 million tonnes of municipal refuse that the Chinese discord each year.
Poorer countries, including Indonesia, continue to rely on landfills, but these have also
been getting more sanitary. Burkati, which receives 7,000 tonnes of rubbish a day, now
covers trash heaps with black plastic that captures the methane gas and other pollutants.
From 2008 to 2014, Morocco increased the proportion of rubbish deposited in sanitary landfills
rather than open dumps from 10% to 53%. This is expected to rise to 80% once five additional
facilities are completed. Many authorities enlist the private sector while monitoring
how it performs. Istanbul accelerated a switch to private providers in 2003 after discovering
they were a third more efficient than the public sector. In Nepal, operators are paid
based on how many households get daily collection. Five Moroccan cities, home to a quarter of
the kingdom's people, use citizen report cards when deciding to renew contracts with providers.
Collection rates in Lahore, Pakistan's commercial capital, shot up from 51% to 88% once the
city hired a private company to manage its rubbish.
Lories are monitored with GPS trackers to measure performance and ensure that unscrupulous trash
collectors do not dump the stuff illegally rather than drive it to formal disposal sites.
Informal workers or rag pickers remain an important part of the system. UN Habitat, the United
Nations Agency for Human Settlements, believes that such people can collect 50 to 100% of
rubbish at no cost to municipalities. The World Bank estimates that they pick 20% of
China's municipal waste. Waste pickers know physics, chemistry, economics, Marvell's
Gonzalo Munoz, founder and boss of Tricyclos, a Chilean waste management company. They don't
know they know, but they do. That is just as well, for ordinary citizens lack this knowledge.
In China, for instance, a new requirement for big cities to install colour-coded bins
in public areas and buildings has shown mixed results, with few citizens knowing what to
throw where. This explains why the Chinese authorities tolerate informal waste pickers.
Local governments in other countries actively embrace the sector, which is thought to include
more than 15 million people worldwide. A Brazilian law from 2010 recognised cooperatives
of such categories as service providers. This granted them access to benefits such as pensions.
Their National Union won the rights to clean up football stadiums during the 2014 World
Cup in Brazil. Technology is making informal collection more efficient. Mobile apps to
match scavengers with rubbish producers are proliferating. Last year a free mobile app
called Kataki, which links those throwing stuff away with those collecting it, was launched
in Sao Paulo. Indian radiollas in Bengaluru have used a similar app called I Got Garbage
since 2014. In rich countries like America, the absence
of professional waste pickers presents a problem. The general public is not very good
at sorting rubbish. Households and businesses serviced by municipal waste management providers
may actually have got worse at sorting in the past 20 years, says Peter Keller of Republic
Services, America's second biggest waste management firm, which runs Newby Island in San Jose.
Citizens of rich countries, where almost 100% of municipal waste gets collected, take such
services for granted, unless the collectors go on strike, as happened in the Belgian city
of Ghent in early August, leaving streets in a stink for days.
In some industrialised nations, increasingly, residents are charged based on volume, known
as pay as you throw. To encourage sorting, such schemes often exempt recyclables. In
Taipei, the bin men will only accept unsorted general waste in official bags, which comes
in different sizes at different prices. They inspect recyclables to weed out cheats. The
recyclables then proceed to materials recovery facilities, or MRFS, for further triage.
Local waste is whisked to incinerators, or, now rarely in Taiwan's case, landfills.
In many parts of Europe and America, rubbish collection is generally paid for by municipal
taxes and the garbage disappears to huge facilities like Newby Island. The Plants Operator, Republic
Services, runs 91 MRFS nationwide, next door to landfills, of which it runs 191, or incinerators,
of which it owns 114, which burn waste to produce electricity. It receives 156 trucks
carrying 1,600 tonnes each day from as far afield as Fresno, 200 kilometres to the east.
That is down from 2,200 tonnes a day a few years ago. The volume of recyclables has reached
1,400 tonnes a day, a lot by American standards, says Mr Keller.
That should come as no surprise. After all, inhabitants of the San Francisco Bay Area
pride themselves on their recycling prowess. San Francisco boasts a recycling rate of
80%, one of the highest of any rich world city. San Franciscans may therefore be shocked
to learn that a lot of them, as Mr Keller puts it, aren't very good at it. A pair of
blue jeans can jam the whole line for an hour, he groans. More than a hundred sorters try
to pluck such items from the stream before that happens. Even so, a big plant like Newby
experiences on average five such stoppages every day. Such disruptions cost the city
of Phoenix in Arizona $1 million a year in stalled equipment and repairs.
Scott Smithline, who oversees recycling at California's Environmental Protection Agency,
cites two possible reasons. The first is that many people do not know what is recyclable.
The other problem is that residents only have to separate recyclables from non-recyclables,
though compost bins for organic waste have appeared now too.
Some things are recyclable on their own, but not when combined, such as paper cups lined
with plastic film. It is hard to blame consumers for feeling increasingly baffled, he admits.
The other problem is that residents only have to separate recyclables from non-recyclables,
though compost bins for organic waste have appeared now too.
Cans, bottles and papers are all thrown into one bin. This mix can, to some degree, be
sorted at plants like Newby, enabled by clever technology which uses optical sensors and
magnets to separate materials automatically. These were no match for humans when it came
to sorting, but were good enough for China's recycling industry when it took off in the
1990s to supply the country's growing ranks of manufacturers hungry for all manner of
materials. It snapped up tons of imperfectly sorted western waste, preferring it to the
even more impure refuse available at home. As the volume of recyclables swelled in America
and Europe, the quality of recycled output declined because everything was mixed in
together. This did not trouble MRF operators so long as they could offload their increasingly
impure stock abroad. Then China announced it would not accept any plastics or cardboard
and American waste management companies have been scrambling to find what to do with their
poor quality waste. Efforts are springing up to teach residents how better to sort their
rubbish. Some American and European cities now pick up different materials on alternate
days. Reverse vending machines, which accept empty drink bottles and return money to users
are appearing in supermarkets. More cities are adopting pay-as-you-throw schemes. Consumer
habits will take longer to change. Developing countries need to concentrate on getting bin
men to the curb of every residence and help stop people throwing trash into rivers. The
developed world needs to relearn how to recycle. The Chinese ban has lent all of this a new
urgency.