Pandas enlisted in green appeal
Print Edition
GETTING people to recycle often means catching their attention. Bins shaped like pandas seem to do the trick in a successful project to reuse clothing and other textiles.
Xiao Zhu, 28, goes to residential complexes in southern areas of the Pudong New Area regularly to collect used clothing and other textile products from the panda bins set up at the gates.
He is one of five drivers employed by Shanghai Yuanyuan Industrial Co, which has the local government franchise to recycle residents’ unwanted textiles. The discards are either sent to poor areas or turned into other usable products, depending on their quality.
“The idea of the panda recycling boxes can be traced back to 2007, when I noticed a sanitation worker picking clothes out of rubbish bins,” said 58-year-old Li Junlong, vice president of the company.
“I thought what a waste it was to treat reusable clothing like rubbish.”
Li, a Taiwanese native who moved to Shanghai in 1989, discovered that the city didn’t have a recycling program like the one in his hometown, so he decided to start one here. He enlisted the partnership of Yang Yinghong, now chairman of Yuanyuan, via friends.
Li set up a company in 2008 and won government approval to operate a textile recycling service in 2011.
To date, there are more than 2,000 panda bins installed at residential communities, schools and enterprises around the city. The number keeps increasing as the success of the program expands.
The recycling service is free and gets no public funding. The company makes money by selling products made from the discarded clothing.
Li and Yang started their enterprise with 28 bins in 27 communities in the Zhabei District. It was designed as a trial run.
“We first used large cube-shaped metal bins painted in dark blue and placed near ordinary rubbish bins,” he said. “But we found that people weren’t distinguishing our bins from garbage bins and were dumping all sorts of refuse in ours.”
The company hit upon the idea of making their bins more distinctive in a people-friendly way.
Using fiberglass extracted from used textiles, they manufactured the first-generation of panda boxes.
“The panda is our national treasure and people love the animal,” he said.
The panda boxes have undergone upgrading to make the joints tighter and the bins more waterproof. The company makes six of them a day.
A Shanghai Daily reporter visited Yuanyuan’s factory in suburban Qingpu District to view the process of sorting and packaging collected textile discards.
Good quality clothing is separated for distribution to poor families in impoverished provinces of China. It is disinfected before leaving the factory. Textiles of poorer quality are processed into products such as heat shields for autos, fridge accessories and some construction materials at a China Ting Group factory in Hangzhou.
“Those textiles are pulverized without using any chemicals in the processing to avoid pollution,” said Zang Lie, the assistant chairman of Yuanyuan. “There is no bad smell in the factory.”
At Yuanyuan, there are separate heaps of sorted textiles — wools and cottons here, synthetics and down feathers there.
“After being sent to the factory in Hangzhou, they are scanned by machine to determine the fabric content,” Zang said. “The recycling method depends on that content.”
“We and the China Ting Group, owner of the Hangzhou factory, are planning to set up a large factory for textile recycling in an industrial park in Hangzhou next year,” Zang said. “Then we can introduce more advanced machinery from abroad.”
The panda bin recycling program has become a popular public fixture.
Upmarket clothing retailers like H&M and GAP also donate some defective products and leftover stock to the company for recycling.
“I remembered in our early days, there was a man in his 80s who lived alone opposite to our panda bin,” Li said. “He became its unofficial caretaker. When he found it overflowing with clothes, he would take the excess into his home and call us to haul it away.”
Another time, a police official watched one of the company’s vehicles emptying a panda bin and took down the license plate. He later traced the number to Yuanyuan’s office and arranged for discarded police uniforms to be recycled through the company.
“Residents often call us to say ‘our panda bin is full’ or to tell us if a flap is broken,” Zang said.
The company has also launched the “love sweater” project in several communities. Good-quality sweaters are given to volunteers, mainly middle-aged and elderly women, who then unravel the knitting and remake the yarn into children’s clothing.
“The ‘love sweaters’ are sent to schools in poor areas,” Zang said.
The Yuanyuan staff carefully logs the use of its bins. Some require collection almost every day; others once a week or twice a month. The company also stands ready to pick up discarded clothing from households in areas where there are no panda bins yet.
“Our idea is to use what we take from society for the benefit of society,” Zang said. “We are committed to reducing waste. It requires energy and a certain amount of fibers to make clothing. If we can, for example, recycle cotton, we can save all the water it takes to grow the crop and the energy it takes to process the cotton and turn it into clothing.”
The company does suffer from theft at its bins.
“The incidence of theft has increased with higher volumes of donated clothing,” Li said.
“And vandalism of the bins requires extra costs of maintenance and production.”
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