Household waste refers to solid waste generated by people in their daily lives or activities that provide services for daily life, as well as solid waste that is considered urban household waste according to laws and administrative regulations. Urban household waste mainly includes residential waste, market trade and commercial waste, public place waste, street cleaning waste, and school, enterprise and institution household waste; Since the reform and opening up, with the sustained high-speed development of the economy and rapid expansion of urbanization, China has become the world's leading producer of household waste after surpassing the United States. The problems of arbitrary dumping of household waste, extensive occupation of land, serious environmental pollution, and massive waste of resources caused by this have become important factors affecting environmental protection and sustainable development. Due to the fact that urban household waste is a mixture of various types of waste, whether to adopt sanitary landfill, composting, or incineration disposal techniques is an important prerequisite for achieving resource utilization, reduction, and harmlessness in the classification and treatment of household waste.

 

1. Without effective front-end classification, it is impossible to carry out the incineration, biochemical treatment, and landfill technology of household waste treatment in an orderly manner. The research and technological application of domestic waste management in China mainly began in the late 1980s, initially focusing on the final treatment and disposal of waste. By the late 1990s, domestic waste management gradually shifted from final disposal to the entire process, and from a single treatment method to a comprehensive treatment system. The concept of domestic waste classification also entered China at the end of the 1990s, which is no longer unfamiliar to countrymen people: but when it is really implemented, the situation is not optimistic. At present, the classification of domestic waste in all chains in China is almost chaotic.

 

2. Since 2000, China has designated eight cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Xiamen, and Guilin as pilot cities for household waste classification and collection. Although China's household waste classification has gone through more than ten years, it still seems to be a slogan. At present, the majority of cities in China adopt a mixed collection method for household waste collection. Apart from pilot cities, many other cities do not have household waste classification and collection facilities at all. In cities with such facilities, citizens and pedestrians cannot achieve garbage classification and disposal. Even if garbage is classified and disposed of, due to the lack of a garbage sorting center, it is still mixed and transported to a garbage disposal site for centralized processing. At the "2008 China Solid Waste Advanced Forum", Wang Kai, Chief Engineer of Beijing Sande Environmental Protection Group, summarized the current situation of "mixed collection as one of the characteristics of Chinese household waste." This conclusion is inevitably surprising. Are those classification and collection bins just decorations? What are the bottlenecks in household waste classification? After analysis, the main reasons for the slow implementation of China's policies on the classification, collection, and sustainable treatment of household waste include a lack of environmental awareness, insufficient publicity, high costs, lax supervision, investment focused on terminal incineration or landfill, and a lack of full process layout. Despite the aforementioned issues, in the current domestic context where the first government regulation on the classification and management of urban household waste in China, the "Interim Regulations on the Classification and Management of Urban Household Waste in Guangzhou City," was implemented on April 1, 2011, with the worsening problem of household waste pollution, it is imperative to seek breakthroughs in household waste classification.