Favorable turnaround

Smelly manual labor from dawn to dusk, giant brooms in hand, pushing garbage carts around. Such a stereotype of sanitation workers remains quite prominent in the minds of many Beijingers, but it is somewhat outdated.

Small as it may be, the premise occupied by the BESEG in a corner of the Olympic Green was big enough to position a headquarters complete with management offices and a recess area for 1,500 workers, a parking lot and a garbage transport station.

Zhang's assistant, Yu Jihong, also an Olympic project manager, called this base camp "hard-won" and "a wise decision based upon the routine sanitation management at Tian'anmen Square."

"Having a physical presence in Tian'anmen Square and the Olympic Green would make great differences in our daily operation. A quick response to emergencies would be difficult otherwise," he said. "But the key here is not what we want but whether they (the authorities) agree to give."

The importance of environmental sanitation was indeed recognized but always relegated to the background of city management. It was the Olympics, however, that brought about a favorable turnaround, Yu said.

One precious legacy of the Olympics is high-technology. With more than 600 million yuan (about US$88 million) invested on garbage disposal facilities and cleaning vehicles, the BESEG has extended its machinery cleaning to 94 percent of its managed streets, with manual labor spared for the cleaning of pavement, greens and city furniture such as chairs and garbage cans.

"When you ride in an imported multi-functioning vehicle worth almost 5million yuan, road cleaning is no longer a toil," Yu said.

To secure quick response, the group also installed GPS devices on all vehicles operating inside the Olympic Green, an area 10 times as large as Tian'anmen Square, for the headquarter to monitor and dispatch in time.

In its Xiaowuji Garbage Transport Station in eastern Beijing, it is the first city facility using optical spectrum technology to realize automatic garbage classification. This has helped China honor its promise to the International Olympic Committee of recycling at least half of its waste.

"Mechanization is a key index to measure the advancement of environmental sanitation. Putting the suburbs aside, downtown Beijing is quite well equipped with leading sanitation technology," Zhang said.

"To come to the front however, dedication and professionalism passed down from the poorly-equipped older generation must continue to be advocated," he said.

As the number of visitors in the Olympic Green during the National Day holiday reached a daily high of 520,000, almost twice its designed capacity, sanitation workers have been combative in their fight against garbage there.

With winter coming, Zhang expects tougher fights ahead as heavy snow in 2001 paralyzed the city's traffic and aroused loud public grumbling.

"There are no small things when it comes to city management, sanitation is to be spotlighted," he said.

(Xinhua News Agency October 8, 2008)