上海的废品回收大军

China is often accused of all but destroying its environment in the name of economic growth. But the same naked capitalism that has poisoned Chinese skies and waterways is hard at work in the streets of Shanghai, cleaning up the mess.

China has a 10m-strong illegal army of rubbish entrepreneurs and in Shanghai they can seem ubiquitous.

Three-wheeled bicycles piled impossibly high with plastic, cardboard and Styrofoam ply the streets. Pensioners pick through rubbish bins for drinks cans, or beg empty water bottles from tourists. Grannies brave the subway at rush hour to collect commuters' discarded newspapers. Migrant workers go door to door like rag men, buying up the cast-offs of Shanghai's conspicuous consumption, designer water bottles and flat screen television boxes which would otherwise clog up the city's landfills.

While China's leaders bicker with environmentalists over emissions targets, it can appear that its people are quietly getting on with the task of making the planet a better place to live.

But while Beijing has a grand plan for the greening of China, the country's trash pickers are decidedly not part of it. During the 2008 Beijing Olympics they were largely run out of town (with disastrous consequences for city waste, as recyclables piled up on pavements).

And recyclers in Shanghai's uber-chic French concession are already making plans to leave town during the city's six-month World Expo, which starts May 1. They are mostly unlicensed migrants without city residency documents, and therefore vulnerable to any crackdown on rubbish peddlers and to a general Expo-inspired anti-migrant campaign.

The irony of such a purge is clearly lost on the government: Expo's central theme is green cities, and many Expo pavilions have been constructed with recycled materials.

The past year has been tough already for China's recyclers: the global financial crisis savaged rubbish prices, which still languish well below their pre-crisis levels.

Cai Yan Fen has a paper and plastic recycling business on the outskirts of Shanghai, where she lives with her eight- month-old baby in a shack next to a muddy yard strewn with twisted bits of scrap metal, broken toilet seats and twine.

She says Shanghai residents stopped selling their waste during the crisis, because it simply was not worth it to them.

“It was a big blow to our business,” she says, noting that profits have still not recovered. She now has to sell 10kg of paper to make a single renminbi in profit.

But Fu Li Ping, the head of the Shanghai waste administration, has little positive to say about Shanghai's rubbish brigade, arguing that their motives have more to do with profits than the environment. Their recycling stations are eyesores that are being removed as part of the greening of Shanghai for Expo, she says, without a hint of irony.

Shanghai has its own plan to encourage recycling by residents, which requires them to store recycling in their minuscule flats for a month at a time – in exchange for points they can redeem for recycled pencils and other trinkets online.

Ms Fu hardly disputes the fact that anyone rich enough to have space in their flat for a month's worth of newspapers – in one of the world's priciest property markets – probably can do without another pencil.

The government has legitimate reason for concern. Though recyclers reduce the rubbish going into landfills – and reduce public tensions too, since residents protest when overflowing landfills mean it must be burned – the by-products of illegal recycling can be toxic and dangerous. Itinerant recyclers dismantling a laptop for scrap can often leave plenty of other waste behind when they are done.

Shanghai wants to regulate the recyclers, and even issue them with uniforms.

“The government looks at these people as disorder, and the Chinese government hates disorder,” says Adam Minter, author of the blog Shanghai Scrap.

“They are like Mao's army during the Long March days: very irregular, but very efficient. The government wants to turn them into a regular army.”

But that will take time, and in the meantime Beijing is working all-out to increase private consumption. Whatever will happen to all those boxes?