Abstract
Cities all over the world are trying to divert municipal waste away from landfill and fossil fuel-assisted incineration and toward circular economies where waste is converted into new resources. Residential food waste is the most challenging sub-stream, as it is the worst culprit in producing greenhouse gases in landfill and incineration, and it is almost impossible to have residents separate it cleanly at source. Here we investigate the outstanding diversion results of Shanghai Municipality since the introduction of the July 2019 Municipal Regulations, of over 9600 tons per day of clean food waste, still maintained two years later. In particular, we question why they might have increased so sharply after July 2019 and examine historic policies to determine broad policy intentions, their implementations, and officially reported tonnages of different resulting waste streams. It was found that many prior steps included infrastructure building and piloting different behavioral approaches. However, the July 2019 policy brought in legal responsibilities to very clearly defined roles for each stakeholder—including for the residents to sort and for local governances to support them—and this pulled all the operational elements together. The immediate and sustained jumps in clean food waste collection fed biogas production (0.1–1.0 GWh/day) and energy-from-waste (less wet) (5.4–8.6 GWh/day).
Highlights
The amount of urban domestic garbage waste grows rapidly with economic and social development in developing countries and this includes China, where it reached 343 million tons in 2019 [1]
In this paper we focus on step-wise improvements to energy production from waste management which were identified immediately after the 2019 policy implementation in Shanghai, and investigate why they are being achieved instead of previously
Shanghai has achieved a step-wise increase in the tonnages of residential food waste which are effectively sorted so that they can be diverted from landfill and fossil-driven incineration
Summary
The amount of urban domestic garbage waste grows rapidly with economic and social development in developing countries and this includes China, where it reached 343 million tons in 2019 [1]. Attention turned to food waste, which comprises 50–70% of urban domestic garbage in China (nearly 20% higher than averaged globally) [3]. This food waste component is the source of many of the serious environmental problems created when the mixed waste goes into landfill and incineration, because it produces methane and leachates [4,5]. Some unsuccessful or small-scale pilots in the USA [6], e.g., from producer-pay related policies; in Chinese Taiwan from policies requiring residents to meet the waste trucks on the street [8]; community-based bespoke pilots in Sweden [9], Thailand [10] and Umea [11]
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