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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. Te first three shots document the build-out completed just before the Olympics by the Haidian district SOE (aka Kaiyuan Recycling) of a facility they acquired in Hanjiachuan. The next three photos are of a baling station that was managed in tandem by the Yingchuan and Dongdu companies, and an image of the volume of materials the Olympic monopoly gave them.
During the same weeks in June and July that the state owned companies were revving up, informal collectors were being chased off the streets and recycling markets where shuttered, disguised, and demolished. The picture series below document 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 ordered to festoon themselves in huge Olympic or nature themed plastic 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 closed for business in late June. On the day of the closing, dozens of recyclers in trucks and three wheel bike carts, gathered in the area around the markets 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 the signed papers acknowledging the market's demolition.
In the longer term picture of Beijing's recycling sector, 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 take over staged for the IOC's benefit; the state companies' exclusive access soon unwound when the events were over, and migrants recyclers picked up where they left off.