Take-out garbage is common, and plastic lunch boxes are difficult to recycle.
There are many take-out platform merchants, a variety of packaging of different ingredients, how much plastic waste is produced in the national take-out, it is difficult to accurately count, and a large number of take-out plastic waste is mixed into domestic waste treatment.
Professor Wen Zongguo, director of the Circular Economy Industry Research Center at Tsinghua University's School of Environment, pointed out that China will generate more than 17 billion takeout orders in 2020, with an annual growth rate of about 30% to 40%. By 2023, the amount of takeaway plastic waste produced could be between 600,000 and 1 million tons.
From the perspective of some mixed waste treatment methods in the country, incineration accounts for about 55% and landfill is about 40%. In the landfill process, due to its non-degradable nature, the impact of takeaway plastic waste on groundwater and soil will be relatively prominent.
Professor Wen Zongguo pointed out that in order to effectively control the problem of plastic pollution of takeaway waste, the best way is to recycle and reuse. In response to the recycling problem, Professor Wen Zongguo's team carried out an innovative exploration of the application of artificial intelligence technology to the recycling of low-value waste such as takeout plastic waste.
"Plastic reduction" needs to "pick up plastic" and increase plastic recycling
At the beginning of this year, Shenzhen launched a pilot project of commercial office take-out packaging waste sorting and recycling. In the pilot office building, a special garbage can for takeaway packaging waste has been added. After employees dump takeaway food scraps into the kitchen waste bin, all takeaway packaging is separately collected and sent for recycling. At present, the project has covered 86 commercial office buildings in Shenzhen, recycling nearly 1,000 kilograms of takeaway food boxes every day.
In July 2020, the city of Xiamen revised the guidance catalogue of low value-added recyclables for domestic waste, and takeout lunch boxes were included in low-value recyclables and were no longer regarded as other garbage. In the pilot community, all plastic waste is recyclable, the reminder is very striking, residents in the takeaway plastic lunch boxes, cutlery and plastic bags will be centrally recycled, shipped to the country's first low-value recyclable sorting center located in the Haicang district of Xiamen City. No need for manual sorting, all enter the intelligent sorting platform.
