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Winners and Losers in Beijing's Olympic Recycling Show
The city could have used the opportunity to lift up its informal collectors for the world's appreciation as they were tremendously efficient at salvaging any material of value from Beijing’s waste streams. Instead, the government used the Olympics as a pretense to funnel millions in financing to its state-owned recycling companies and grant them monopoly access contracts to Olympic venues. At the same time, the city government and police went to battle against the informal sector in an effort to erase their presence from Beijing, at least for the duration of the games.
The winners and losers of this Olympic recycling game were etched into the capital's physical landscape. State-owned facilities were expanded, got spruced up, purchased new equipment, and then benefitted from a gush of high-value recyclables they alone could access. Three state-owned companies were granted these contracts: the Haidian district company, the Chaoyang district's Dongdu Zhongxing company, and Shunyi's Yingchuang company.
Above are photos of these SOE expansions. The first three photos document the build-out by the Haidian district SOE (aka Kaiyuan Recycling) of a facility they acquired in Hanjiachuan. The next three show the sorting and baling station jointly managed by the Yingchuan and Dongdu companies including and image of the bounty of materials the Olympic monopoly bestowed.
During the same summer weeks that these state owned companies were revving up, informal collectors were being hounded off the streets and the recycling markets they frequented were shuttered and disguised, and several were demolished. The picture series below documents some of the ways this crackdown played out in informal market spaces.
Informal markets, whether forced to shutter temporarily or slated for immediate demolition, were admonished to festoon themselves in huge Olympic or nature themed tarps to hide their activities throughout the summer. This first series of pictures shows these tarps in action.
This second series documents what happened in east Beijing where two informal markets, about 170 scrap stalls total, were summarily shuttered in late June. On the day of the closing, dozens of recyclers in trucks and three wheel bike carts gathered along the road trying to figure out what to do with their loads. The smaller market, whose owners had better ties to the local government, locked their gates but continued to sneak some recyclers in through their "back" gate. The larger market, of about 100 stalls, was demolished after the owners were held by the authorities for three days straight until signing papers acknowledging the market's demolition.
The Olympics was just a concentrated expression of the state's decades-long policy of dispensing largess to government affiliated companies while inflicting uncompensated losses and displacement on migrant entrepreneurs. But the Olympics was only a temporary show staged for the IOC's benefit; the state-owned companies' exclusive control of urban spaces unwound soon after the events were over, and migrant recyclers picked up where they left off.