In all likelihood, the enduring physical legacy of China’s internet boom will not be the glass-and-steel office complexes or the fancy apartments for tech elites.
It will be the plastic.
The astronomical growth of food delivery apps in China is flooding the country with takeout containers, utensils and bags. And the country’s patchy recycling system isn’t keeping up. The vast majority of this plastic ends up discarded, buried or burned with the rest of the trash, researchers and recyclers say.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/tech ... trash.html
This year, Shanghai has introduced new laws to ensure people recycle all recyclable waste and banning single-use plastic cutlery in restaurants. This is apparently also bad:
China is in the sixth year of a "war on pollution" designed not only to clean up its skies, soil and water but also upgrade its heavy industrial economy and "comprehensively utilize" its resources, including waste.
Improving recycling rates is crucial to China's strategy, and cities are trying to figure out what to do with the heaps of trash clogging up rivers or buried in hazardous landfills.
Citizens, however, are finding the new system complicated enough, with every item of waste now under careful scrutiny, from receipts and half-eaten crayfish to soggy cups of "bubble tea." Residents are also unhappy about getting their hands dirty.
"It's really a lot of trouble," said a 68-year old resident called Shen. "Plastic bags have to be put in one bin and if they are dirty they must be cleaned out, and then your hands get filthy. It's really unhygienic."
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2019/06 ... trash.html