Beijing Garbage provides a “snapshot” of the municipal solid waste (MSW) situation in Beijing, based primarily on three months of fieldwork conducted by Stefan Landsberger during the spring of 2017. Although data for the book is limited, Landsberger brings together literature from different social science disciplines on an array of topics that are helpful for contextualizing garbage problems in China. The main themes of the study are issues related to sorting household garbage, a set of new recycling companies that use online platforms, and the state's push to deal with MSW through incineration. Landsberger demonstrates that despite education campaigns and other initiatives, Beijingers do not sort and recycle their garbage well, which makes the incineration of garbage more polluting. His main recommendation is for the government to “adopt a system of rewards and penalties” to spur behavior changes (p. 183).

Jumping into the middle, in chapter 5, Landsberger describes a garbage-sorting pilot project in two Beijing districts that began in 2010. Local governments had to hire instructors to provide information and guidance to households on how to properly sort their garbage. Yet, over time, many of these instructors had to resort to sorting garbage for the community residents, as the residents mistook them for waste workers who “were there to do the actual separation work for them” (p. 139). This tidbit exemplifies how the government and NGOs have struggled to influence residents to classify and sort their household garbage. Landsberger explains that residents lack trust in the government's waste management system and expect others to take the responsibility for them, be it rural migrants who make a living as informal waste collectors or the government itself. Crucially, many residents who have participated in household garbage sorting report that the waste they carefully separated in their residential areas ended up being dumped together into one garbage truck, seriously calling into question the significance of their efforts (p. 84).

The study examines the sorting issue from several angles. Most prominently, in chapter 2, and again in chapters 3 and 4, Landsberger looks at a set of garbage disposal and recycling companies that have emerged under the auspices of “Internet Plus Recycle” by jumping on board with a state-backed initiative to utilize internet-based innovation as a means for new economic growth. Using smartphone applications, these companies took advantage of government subsidies and crafted a high-tech, modern image to try to outcompete informal collectors in terms of accessing household waste that is recyclable and can be sold as scrap. Despite excitement for this trend, Landsberger finds that, on one hand, these companies “have not been successful in their public relations work,” as none of his sources had heard of them (p. 95), and, on the other hand, these companies had not employed or otherwise impacted informal waste collectors and therefore were “irrelevant” to them (p. 119). Given these conclusions, Landsberger would have been wise to analyze these companies less as offering innovative new solutions that have yet to succeed, and more as representing only the latest incarnation of state-entrepreneurial attempts to replace or regulate the massive informal economy of waste collecting and trading, a process that dates back at least to the early 2000s.Footnote ¹ Future research could pose questions that are based on this continuity rather than novelty.

Landsberger's justification for focusing so much attention on household garbage sorting is tied to China's trend toward using incineration as the primary technology for processing MSW. Comparatively speaking, China's MSW is very “wet,” containing 70 to 80 percent food waste. This is not ideal for waste-to-energy incineration, as wet garbage neither ignites nor burns well, it generates more carcinogenic dioxins, and it often requires adding supplementary fuels such as coal that add costs and worsen polluting emissions. Thus, incineration plant managers call for better sorting and recycling practices of residents, a position embraced by Landsberger. Yet data from the book contradicts this position. First, the state has invested heavily in incineration and not in recycling or composting infrastructure. Although there are well-developed informal industries that trade recyclable scrap, these industries are not directly connected to the separate waste bins of residential areas and generally are not seen by middle-class residents and the government as doing the work of environmental protection.

Second, incineration plants are not simply altruistic entities addressing garbage problems; rather, they are run by private companies whose profitability relies on government subsidies combined with selling the electricity generated from burning waste. While better sorting and recycling could help provide a dryer and more adequate raw material for electricity generation, if done effectively, these practices would also greatly reduce the amount raw material (i.e., garbage) that is available for incineration. As an interviewee from the NGO Friends of Nature suggests, “although incinerators are designed to decrease the amount of garbage that is generated, they in fact demand more garbage be produced in order to be more profitable” (p. 156).

Landsberger leaves these contradictions unanalyzed. Instead, he maintains the position that sorting household waste is inherently “beneficial for improving the environment” and seeks to explain why “residents seem unwilling and/or unable to internalize” such behavior (p. 62). Ultimately, he embraces the “implementation of a third-party surveillance system” (p. 62) to influence behaviors. In so doing, he does not take as seriously as he could residents’ critiques, their agency as expressed in noncompliance, and the validity of their mistrust in government-backed waste management infrastructure. In sum, although the book does little to challenge the status quo in its conclusions, it presents interesting data on the theater of unsuccessful household garbage-sorting initiatives that can be interpreted in different ways and can be of use to future researchers working on related topics.