Recycling

In China there is no official recycling policy nor collection service even though in big cities like Shanghai or Beijing or Guangzhou there are thousands of scattered differentiated garbage bins... this, though, is only little or no use to municipal or city government garbage collector that make no difference at all in what their trucks swallow.

This typical Chinese contradiction is instead very important to part of the urban population that make literally a living out of this lack of specific service from government: there are in fact thousand of migrant workers most of them coming from the countryside that move around the town, either on foot or bicycle or more "sophisticated" vehicles like this in the picture to collect plastic bottles, cardboard, metals and glass.
They diligently and regularly sweep the streets searching for these items, they collect them and eventually sell them to private company that dispose or re-utilize these materials.

The question is if this method is good or not: on one side it allows many poor people to make a living out of this business on the other side it keeps feeding and sustaining a system that is not inherently right and that keeps attracting people to the city but not to a decent living.