APPROACH TO ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS 99
China also has a few other unique advantages, not available to the USSR, for example. I shall outline these along with achieved results, theory and practice which recent visitors to the People's Republic have commented on. For instance, there is the public health campaign: ^On the eve of^July 1" (Party Founding Day), Wuhanheld a patriotic health movement drive week, mobilized an army of one million strong, cleared away more than 15,000 tons of garbage, opened up more than 2500 drains, removed wild grass and recovered more than 2800 tons of scrap metal.952
Innumerable examples could be given from other Chinese cities. The recovery of tons of scrap metal and medicinal herbs seems a constant spin-off of the public health campaigns. With the young and old of the neighbourhood bringing in scrap metal in such campaigns, we arrive at the Chinese equivalent of recycling: multi-purpose use.
WASTES INTO TREASURE
Wandering around Peking in the summer of 1971, we decided to stop at a neighbourhood department store. Prominently displayed on one of the entrance doors was a list of household items and prices: Shoppers would get so much if they returned bottles to the store. There was nothing new in that. But as we read on, our eyes widened. Not only would returned bottles get the shopper some money, but so would the return of such items as broken mirrors and used-up toothpaste tubes—toothpaste tubes!
This systematic recovery effort seems widespread in urban stores and fits in as the most naturally expectable consequence of a process, policy and attitude that starts with economizing raw materials in their pristine state and goes through ^multi-purpose use55 at factory, industry, city and province levels.
The American view of waste matter seems by and large to consist of one driving idea: Get rid of it. It does not matter how, so long as it is out of seeing or smelling range. It is fine to purify it, chlorinate it, treat it somehow before you get rid of it. But the main thing is to get rid of it. Flush it. We might call this view aesthetic. It accepts the idea that there will be wastes and defines the problem as one of disposal.
The Chinese look at the problem differently. First, they speak of the three (sometimes four) wastes: waste water, gas, and residue (the occasional fourth is waste heat). Then they call for the whole country to turn the three wastes into treasure, the harmful into beneficial. Philosophically, they put it this way — we might call it the dialectics of waste:
The process of production is one in which man knows, transforms and utilizes nature. But nature's resources cannot be fully utilized by producing one product. In making one product, resources are partially transformed into this product and the rest becomes ^waste.9' The question is how to look at this ^waste" — from which point of