2 . The waste management park at Water Beach in Cambridge-shire handles 400,000 tons of recycling every year.

Fran Hawes is standing on the edge of a mountain of dry recycling. She says, “Some think it’s a discouraging thing, but for me personally, it is a huge responsibility.” Fran, who started to do the job at the age of 26, takes her job very seriously. “I am that annoying person at a party who will get everyone’s recycling and make sure everything goes in the right bin,” she admits. “That’s my job. That’s my mission. That’s what I need to do. It allows me to find my leadership style.”

Bin loader Richard Hughes and his colleagues clock on at the waste service garage in Peter-borough at 6:30 and are out emptying bins within half an hour. Richard works four 12-hour days and admits the pay and the condition are not great—but there are three days off which he can spare to his partner and children. His colleague Crystal Teal has been working as a bin loader for two and a half months. “I didn’t feel my last job gave me self-worth and general happiness, so I decided to change and do something completely different,” she says. “I decided to be a binman. It doesn’t bother me that men are mainly doing it,” Crystal adds. “It can be smelly some days, but go home and have a shower, you’ll be all right.”

“When householders put the wrong material in the recycling bins, it makes me feel angry that they are just putting it out there. We’re doing our job to serve them. We are providing service to take their rubbish away and they can’t do their part to put the right things in,” said Richard.

“Any problem has a solution—therefore I’m not afraid of a pile of waste,” Fran says. “To any normal person, this might be intimidating (令人生畏的). It’s a challenge. But this will be gone by Monday morning.”

3 . When Shanghai introduced a new garbage-sorting policy (垃圾类政策) in July last year, the city’s residents (居民) took some time to get used to it. They joked that every time they took out their garbage, the staff (工作人员) standing by the bins would ask, “What kind of garbage are you?”

Starting on May 1, Beijing joined many Chinese cities by introducing a new garbage-sorting policy, People’s Daily reported. Residents should sort their garbage into four groups: kitchen, recyclable, hazardous (有害的) and other waste.

These groups are represented (代表) by four different colors of trash bins—green, blue, red and gray. Those who fail to sort their trash correctly may be fined up to 200 yuan, Xinhua reported.

Some cities like Shanghai and Qingdao sort their trash differently. These cities use four different groups: wet, recyclable, harmful and dry. Although their names are different, the groups are actually the same. In fact, wet garbage in Shanghai is kitchen garbage in Beijing. And dry garbage is the same as other waste, China Youth Daily reported.

To help residents sort their trash correctly, the Beijing government is offering online guidelines (指导). If people don’t know how to throw away garbage, they can search for it on the WeChat account Guanchenglishi (管城理市) to find out. By searching a keyword or taking a photo, people can immediately find out which group their waste belongs to.