Beijing tackles 'white pollution' in mass clean-up

Beijing council workers and 300,000 volunteers from across the capital took part in a mass rubbish clear-up over the weekend, Xinhua news agency reported.

Clean-up teams collected more than 10,000 waste plastic bags as well as tonnes of polystyrene food trays and disposable cups and boxes.

The initiative is part of a large-scale battle against "white pollution" in the capital, Xinhua said. The municipal government has designated the Last Friday of every month as 'City Clearance Day'.

"This is a good way to curb pollution as well as to investigate the possibility of recycling resources," a Beijing Environmental Sanitation Bureau official told the agency.

Six companies have been involved in a pilot scheme to retrieve polystyrene trays in the capital since June. It is estimated that by the end of the year, 30 per cent of used trays will have been retrieved and recycled, Xinhua said.

From the new year, certain types of plastic bag will be banned from the capital's market, and people are being encouraged to use home-made cloth bags instead of plastic ones, it said.

BBC Monitoring (http://www.monitor.bbc.co.uk), based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.