Reporter Du Xiao, Intern Wang Ziding

Hazardous waste refers to waste that contains harmful substances and requires special safety treatment. The main source of waste is households. It mainly includes: waste batteries (nickel-cadmium batteries, mercuric oxide batteries, lead-acid batteries, etc.), waste fluorescent tubes (fluorescent tubes, energy-saving lamps, etc.), waste thermometers, waste sphygmomanometers, waste medicines and their packaging, waste paints, solvents and their packaging, waste pesticides, disinfectants and their packaging, waste films, waste photo paper, toner cartridges, CDs, pen refills, waste small household appliances, electronic products, etc.

As early as March 2017, the "Implementation Plan for the Classification System of Domestic Waste" issued by the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development required that hazardous waste must be included as one of the categories of mandatory classification. It is understood that Beijing has started to create garbage classification demonstration areas since 2017, and hazardous waste has also been included in the scope of full classification coverage. More and more communities and units have implemented hazardous waste classification collection.

However, the reality of hazardous waste collection is not optimistic. At the winter garbage classification citizen forum held recently, industry insiders conducted an in-depth discussion on this.

Abandoned medicines are discarded at random and pollute the environment

Expired medicines are common solid waste in people's lives.

Song Hongyu, director of the Drug Supervision Section of the Beijing Haidian District Drug Administration, believes that taking expired medicines for a long time is equivalent to suicide. The effective ingredients of expired medicines are reduced, they are dried and dehydrated, and they absorb moisture, which eventually leads to reduced efficacy. The human body cannot absorb the effective ingredients. For example, the efficacy of antibacterial drugs such as amoxicillin and norfloxacin is easily reduced; the chemical composition of the medicine changes, which may decompose some harmful impurities and cause harm to the human body. For example, sulfonamides and penicillins may cause allergies and shock after expiration.

"Abandoned medicines are discarded at random, which will pollute the environment. For example, penicillin will be released into the air, which will cause skin allergies in people around. If it is picked up and sold as new medicine, it will endanger human health." Song Hongyu said.

Regarding the recycling of discarded medicines, Song Hongyu believes that there are special recycling channels for discarded medicines, which should be placed in community discarded medicine recycling bins and harmlessly disposed of by professional organizations organized by regulatory authorities.

Regarding the current problems in the recycling of discarded medicines, Song Hongyu introduced them in combination with his own work, "The medicine recycling bins in Haidian District basically cover a total of 985 recycling bins in the district, and the recycling effect is remarkable. However, due to the limited destruction capacity of environmental protection agencies and environmental protection restrictions, the recycled discarded medicines cannot be destroyed, resulting in a backlog. For this reason, the Drug Administration has sought the support of relevant district departments, and the Haidian District Government has provided great financial support."

"The newly added community recycling bins do not have a 100% coverage rate. Some residents have reported that the recycling bins are difficult to find. We plan to mark the specific location of each discarded medicine recycling bin on Baidu Maps and the Drug Administration WeChat public account, and use Internet technology to improve the convenience of the public in finding recycling bins; at the same time, we must pay attention to anti-theft to prevent criminals from taking them to the market for sale." Song Hongyu said.

Jinbangyuan Community is located in Huilongguan Town, Changping District, Beijing. It was built and put into use in 2001. It has 28 buildings and 1,300 households. It is a residential community that promoted garbage classification earlier.

Qu Yisong, the property manager of the community, said: "Since the knowledge of residents about discarded medicines is not yet popular enough, we can only start with expired medicines that are easy for ordinary residents to identify and start collecting household hazardous waste."

It is understood that before, the relevant departments put two expired medicine recycling bins in Jinbangyuan Community, but the effect was not good due to the inconvenience of placement. For this reason, the property company set up hazardous waste recycling bins with large barrels and convenient placement.

"Some residents put out drugs at random and do not remove the packaging boxes and instructions as required. For this reason, property staff are specially sent to remove the packaging boxes of expired drugs. At the same time, expired drugs can be prevented from being used by some lawless elements and entering the market for the second time to deceive and harm patients. People should be sent to patrol frequently. When the small bucket is full, it should be transferred to the large collection bucket in time to avoid secondary pollution of the environment. When the large collection bucket is full, the drug supervision department should be informed in time to take it away." Qu Yisong said.

Mercury-containing waste is easy to pollute the air

Fluorescent tubes, energy-saving fluorescent lamps, mercury thermometers, mercury sphygmomanometers...all contain a substance in common - mercury.

"China's ambient air quality standards stipulate that the gaseous concentration of mercury in life should be less than 0.05 micrograms/cubic meter. Energy-saving lamps generally contain 5 mg of mercury, which is the amount specified by the national industry standard. Some qualified enterprises produce qualified products within this limit, but in fact, some enterprises exceed this mercury limit for market sales." said Lv Yan, director of the Ecological Community Construction Committee of the Beijing Haidian Harmonious Community Development Center.

According to Lv Yan, if a fluorescent lamp is broken, for example, in a 15 square meter room with a height of about 2.6 meters, the indoor space is about 39 cubic meters. Theoretically, 5 mg of mercury will evaporate and be evenly distributed in this room, which will exceed the national standard by 2,560 times. If a thermometer is broken (with 1,000 mg of liquid mercury inside), in a closed space without windows in winter, the mercury gas concentration in a 15 square meter room will theoretically exceed the national standard by 510,000 times. Experiments have shown that in an office with a room temperature of 26 degrees Celsius and an area of 15 square meters, a broken thermometer will cause mercury leakage. In 3 minutes, the concentration of volatile mercury gas will exceed the national safety standard by more than 100 times.

"If you use a broom to sweep or a rag to wipe the broken mercury waste, it will cause air disturbance and the concentration of mercury gas will rise rapidly. This test proves that mercury evaporates into mercury gas very quickly in the living environment. So once mercury causes indoor pollution, the correct approach is not to wipe the table, sweep the floor, turn on the air conditioner, and apply for a rescue package from the neighborhood committee. If not handled correctly, the indoor pollution of mercury may last for more than 6 months, because there are all kinds of furniture and household appliances with complex structures in our rooms, and household appliances usually have heat dissipation holes, and mercury vapor will be stored in them, forming a chronic mercury pollution source." Lu Yan said.

"The difficulty of temporarily storing waste mercury-containing fluorescent lamps is that they are fragile. Whether it is a small or large hazardous waste barrel, some special shapes of mercury-containing fluorescent lamps are not easy to store. The solutions are: first, send people to patrol frequently and replace small barrels with large barrels in time; second, pack fluorescent lamps of different shapes separately; third, wrap the long lamp tubes with waste cloth; fourth, stack them in waste plastic boxes and wait for transportation." Qu Yisong said.

Yu Jingcheng, the person in charge of a Beijing technology company, summarized how to deal with fluorescent lamps. "From the perspective of organizational measures, we need to determine the management responsibilities and management measures of each department, and determine what specifications, processes and standards these departments and personnel follow for operation and management. From an economic perspective, it is necessary to clarify whether the lamp manufacturer or the consumer pays the processing fee. In terms of technical measures, the 0.15 yuan processing fee for used lamps can turn them into aluminum glass and fluorescent powder. The fluorescent powder is adsorbed by special adsorption materials and sent to hazardous waste treatment centers for re-smelting and turns into mercury. Aluminum and glass are reprocessed into usable aluminum glass and fluorescent powder, and the life cycle of a fluorescent lamp is completed."

What are the experiences of promoting garbage classification in the community?

"The idea of garbage classification originated from the environmental awareness of reducing property costs, disposing of garbage on-site, and reducing garbage emissions. In order to reduce costs, garbage classification has been carried out since 2003," said Qu Yisong.

According to Qu Yisong, on October 17, 2015, the neighborhood committee, property management company and Beijing Haidian Harmonious Community Development Center jointly held the "Jinbangyuan Family Environmental Protection Theme Promotion Day". After the meeting, it was determined that the collection and temporary storage of household solid hazardous waste would be carried out experimentally, and three hazardous waste collection points would be established. The property management company would send special personnel to collect and temporarily store hazardous waste safely, and the Harmonious Community Development Center would send people to guide the safe collection and temporary storage of community hazardous waste, and be responsible for contacting qualified professional departments for safe transportation and harmless resource treatment.

When summarizing the experience of recycling fixed hazardous waste in residential communities, Qu Yisong believes that the first thing to do is to establish a community hazardous waste collection mechanism, with the Harmonious Community Development Center responsible for coordinating all parties, and employees and cleaning team leaders providing professional guidance and training. The second is to popularize knowledge about hazardous waste to residents and property management staff. Third, establish community hazardous waste collection and temporary storage points. Four household collection points were set up, equipped with 6 collection barrels and affixed with unified hazardous waste labels. Fourth, establish centralized temporary storage management as needed. Fifth, distribute household hazardous waste turnover bottles to residents.

"In reality, to properly handle household hazardous waste, it is very important that the community should establish supporting temporary storage infrastructure for hazardous waste treatment, but many communities are obviously lacking in this infrastructure. If hazardous waste is cleared every day like other garbage, it is definitely not cost-effective to drive a car to transport such a small number of batteries, light bulbs, etc., so it is very necessary to set up supporting safe temporary storage facilities in the community. If the community has safe temporary storage facilities, coupled with special transportation tools and back-end processing equipment, then the hardware construction for handling household hazardous waste is basically completed." said Mao Da, a doctor of environmental history and initiator of the Beijing Zero Waste Movement.

Hazardous waste needs to be safely placed and stored

Mao Da believes that household hazardous waste has two attributes. It is both a hazardous waste managed by the environmental protection department and a type of domestic waste managed by the sanitation department. Therefore, this type of waste is relatively special and has higher requirements for management. The management of hazardous waste involves two departments, and there is a problem of coordination between departments.

"Now we are promoting garbage classification, and the first item is that it must be classified, collected, transported and processed. The mandatory scope is 46 key cities in China. The first step for these 46 key cities to carry out garbage classification is to separate household hazardous waste and other hazardous waste from various types of garbage." Mao Da said.

According to Mao Da, according to relevant requirements, relevant departments need to provide corresponding support for the classification and processing of household hazardous waste in terms of both software and hardware.

"In terms of hardware, it is now generally recognized that special treatment facilities at the end must be available first. For example, one method of treating expired medicines is high-temperature incineration, but this method is not suitable for mercury-containing batteries or mercury-containing lamps. These two types of treatment facilities and technologies must also be targeted, otherwise it will be useless to collect them. Secondly, different transportation channels are also needed. An important point that distinguishes household hazardous waste from domestic waste is that household hazardous waste can be safely stored for a period of time, unlike our ordinary domestic waste, which is easy to rot and requires daily clearance. Most hazardous waste only requires the public to place and store it safely, and will not cause harm to the surrounding environment quickly." Mao Da said.

It is also essential to deal with household hazardous waste, strengthen publicity and education, and improve the system and mechanism.

"Residents should be informed of the hazardous waste that the government can cover in public services, and it should be made clear that the relevant departments are capable of handling various types of household hazardous waste. In a certain area, if everyone knows where there are temporary storage facilities, they can go there to dispose of them. If no specific temporary storage facilities are found, there are some temporary collection points in the community, neighborhood committee, and property management, and it is also effective to send household hazardous waste to specific locations through these collection points. It is necessary to ensure that residents are clear about the treatment chain of household hazardous waste." Mao Da said.

Mao Da believes that some hazardous waste may cause some harm at the time, such as broken light bulbs, mercury thermometers, etc. Residents often do not have time to send them to the collection points, and the waste has already begun to leak and cause harm.

"Once there was a female teacher who provided us with this idea: every community should be equipped with an emergency treatment kit, and every community staff should master the emergency treatment methods, and then publicize them to every household. In this way, for items that are not urgently dangerous, we can safely send them to the collection point; for waste that may cause emergency danger, we also know how to deal with it." Mao Da said.

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