MUMBAI - Five years of shipping waste
paper to China made Hong Kong-based Zhang Yin the
world's richest self-made businesswoman. Starting
with US$3,500 in capital, she accumulated a $7
billion fortune, making her a role model for those
seeking to turn rubbish into wealth.
Zhang
Yin began waste-paper trading in Hong Kong in
1985, moved her business to Los Angeles in 1990,
and continued shipping waste paper to mainland
China to make the cardboard
needed for packaging in
China's thriving export industries.
Her
company, Nine Dragons Paper Holdings, now China's
largest packaging maker, saw its stock shoot up
fourfold since its initial public offering last
March. There is no immediate risk of Zhang's
wealth shrinking, as China registered 10.7% growth
in 2006, the fastest since 1995, with exports and
investments booming despite governmental brakes to
slow down the economy.
Zhang's success is
being reflected elsewhere in Asia. In the
industrial township of Noida on the outskirts of
New Delhi, Manik Thapar is a waste-to-riches
entrepreneur. He started his firm, Eco Wise Waste
Management, with seed capital of $120,000 raised
from family and bank loans, paving a path from
dirt to riches in a country where millions of
rag-pickers form the poverty-stricken
waste-disposal army help India recycle more than
90% of its waste.
Eco Wise offers free
garbage collection in Noida, which generates
nearly 400 tonnes of daily waste, and Thapar's
private limited company is now the biggest
recycling plant in the Delhi-Noida area. His rare
labor-friendly policies include health benefits
for workers, a free Sunday picnic lunch at the
plant for their families, and a promise of free
housing in the future.
Growing mountains
of waste are fertile fields for other Zhangs and
Thapars in Asia, which is already reeling under
pressure from multinational corporations,
governments, financial institutions and aid
agencies seeking controversial waste disposal and
destruction technologies such as landfills
(solid-waste disposal sites) and incinerators.
With waste quantity rising and landfills
shrinking, recycling and reuse may be the only
solution. Smart businesses could find gold in this
garbage.
United Nations researchers and
other experts predict that by next year, for the
first time in human history cities will house more
people than rural areas, a demographic shift
largely happening in Asia and Africa. Megacities
are expected to create a waste-disposal challenge
to which political and industrial leaders have
still not given sufficiently serious thought.
Mumbai, one of these megacities already
with a 10-million-plus population, generates 8,000
tonnes of daily waste. "We are running out of
landfills and we have complaints from people
saying garbage dumps are too close to their
homes," Sonya Fernandes of Bombay First, a city
development group, told Asia Times Online. "The
biggest problem we are facing is biomedical and
hospital waste."
E-waste from computers
and other electronic consumer goods poses another
health hazard. "Demand in Asia for electronic
waste began to grow when scrapyards found they
could extract valuable substances such as copper,
iron, silicon, nickel and gold during the
recycling process," says Greenpeace. "A mobile
phone, for example, is 19% copper and 8% iron."
The US Environmental Protection Agency
says that three-quarters of computers sold in the
United States are stockpiled in garages or closets
en route to being dumped in landfills or
incinerators, or exported to Asia.
"E-waste is routinely exported by
developed countries to developing ones, often in
violation of international law," fumes Greenpeace.
"Inspections of 18 European seaports in 2005 found
as much as 47% of waste destined for export,
including e-waste, was illegal.
"In the UK
alone, at least 23,000 metric tons of undeclared
or 'gray' market electronic waste was illegally
shipped in 2003 to the Far East, India, Africa and
China. In the US, it is estimated that 50-80% of
the waste collected for recycling is being
exported in this way. This practice is legal
because the US has not ratified the Basel
Convention."
At the fifth Waste Not Asia
(WNA) conference in the southern Indian city of
Trivendrum on January 18, 14 participating
countries, including India, China, Cambodia, South
Korea and the Philippines, urged adoption of
Integrated Zero Waste Management instead of
polluting technologies like incinerators. The
delegates asked Asian governments to involve the
public and be transparent in all decisions on
waste management.
WNA, a coalition of
citizens' groups and individuals from Asia and the
Pacific, are committed to decentralized
community-based reuse, recycling and composting
programs, and a zero-waste society without
"insane" practices such as incinerators that burn
valuable resources and churn toxic gases and ash.
They want a different answer to garbage, and if
corporate leaders learn from Zhang Yin, the next
generation of Asian blue-chip companies will be
garbage and waste recyclers.
At present,
the waste-market industry, potentially worth
billions, is still at the embryonic stage.
"Before recycling and reuse, our basic
problem is decentralizing waste management and
getting households to learn to separate dry waste
from wet waste," said Sonya Fernandes of Bombay
First, "and not having the Bombay Municipal Corp
garbage trucks mix both together."
A Frost
& Sullivan market research on the solid-waste
recycling market in Southeast Asia observed steady
growth rates.
"The market is likely to
grow steadily in the Philippines, Taiwan,
Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea, while it is
well developed in Australia and New Zealand," the
study said. "Technological innovations in
solid-waste recycling are likely to emerge,
especially in niche markets such as tire
recycling, construction, and demolition-waste
recycling."
Besides the waste-to-wealth
enlightened entrepreneurs, Asia is likely to see
more initiatives such as the Japanese
International Cooperation Agency funding a project
on recycling, reutilizing and reducing waste in
Hanoi to cope with the 2,000 tonnes of waste
generated daily in the city. The project, which is
called 3R and began in December, followed similar
efforts in Thailand, Japan and Malaysia.
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