President Xi Jinping recently underlined efforts to cultivate the good habit of garbage sorting to improve the living environment and contribute to green and sustainable development. What are the serious garbage-related problems China faces and how can they be solved? We will show you the practices of sorting expired medicine in Suzhou city, Jiangsu province.
Suzhou has made a more detailed classification of waste to list expired drugs as hazardous waste to be recycled and disposed of by the sanitation department.
The sanitation department will dispatch workers to collect the expired drugs at the designated sites, officials said.
The pollution caused by one expired drug is equivalent to three waste batteries. When mixed into domestic garbage, they will cause pollution to the air, water and soil.
Some antibacterial drugs, when discarded at will, will destroy the balance of the flora in the environment, enhance the resistance of bacteria, and affect the use of antibiotics.
At present, 130 expired drug collection points are distributed in Suzhou City, mainly in hospitals, community health service centers and some pharmacies.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has underlined efforts to cultivate the good habit of garbage classification to improve the living environment and contribute to green and sustainable development.
Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, made the remarks in an instruction on garbage sorting in early June.
China recycles on average 25 percent of the plastic waste it generates every year. Yet just a small percentage of the packaging waste generated by the food delivery sector including plastic boxes and bags, and disposable chopsticks, is collected as they are light in weight, soiled with oil and leftover food and do not fetch enough return for trash collectors.
