Waste not, want not

Food waste comprises roughly 70 percent of the country's garbage and is difficult to collect, process and recycle - and hazardous not to. Zheng Xin, Wang Kaihao and Cheng Anqi report.

While you often hear Chinese parents tell their kids to not waste food, the fact is food waste accounts for about 70 percent of the country's mounting garbage production. That's compared to less than 20 percent in many developed countries, where sorting and processing have been the norm since the 1980s. And as China's waste processing capabilities simply can't keep pace with the amount of garbage that is being produced, food waste is a bigger problem than it might be. "As people's lives improve, the catering industry is booming and dietary habits are changing, so we're producing massive amounts of food waste," Beijing Technology and Business University's Department of Environmental Science and Engineering professor Ren Lianhai says.

"China has a long way to go in terms of better disposal because it lacks a national policy, scientific management and processing methods."