Education transforms awareness into practice

Though waste sorting has yet to make notable progress nationwide, it has been successful in Hengxian, a county with a population of 1.3 million in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.

According to the county government, garbage sorting is undertaken in about 70 percent of Hengxian's urban area. Last year, 4,128 metric tons of waste - about 11 percent of the trash produced every year by Hengxian's urban area - was composted, helping to reduce the amount buried in landfills by 25 percent.

Once, the county's garbage was sent directly to orchards for use as fertilizer. However, as local living standards rose, orchard owners began refusing the waste, which contained increasing amounts of plastic and glass. That resulted in the county's urban area being "surrounded by garbage, plagued by rivers full of sewage and befouled by bad smells", said Huang Li, a sanitation worker for two decades.