Zaoying Beili community in Chaoyang district is one of Beijing's 1,800 garbage management pilot communities. Wang Jing / China Daily

Despite the winter chill, retired teacher Tian Liping sticks to her daily routine of standing by the trash cans in her community to check the garbage that is being dumped.

"Some people don't do wet and dry separation. They just throw it all in and rush to work," says Tian, who wears a down jacket to keep out the cold and rubber gloves so she can check the trash.

From 7:30-9 am and 6:30-8 pm, the 63-year-old picks out recyclables along with 10 assistants in the Zaoying Beili community of Beijing's Chaoyang district.

The community - one of the capital's 1,800 garbage management pilot communities in 2010 - has three trash canisters in different colors for kitchen, recyclable and other waste.

The idea is to reduce waste at the source.

When Tian is off duty, a disposal worker rides a tricycle around the community and empties the canisters of recyclable waste.

The community's manager Song Shuangming has also hired environmental and sanitation workers from a recycling company to guarantee the separation initiative works properly.

The waste is later transported by Beijing Environmental Sanitation Administrative Bureau (BESAB) trucks to a transfer station and is compressed.

Here, one garbage compressor deals with kitchen waste, while two others deal with the rest of the garbage.

The compressors, which have a 5-ton loading capacity, have a sliding track onto which the garbage is transported into a container and squeezed, causing slop to flow out of a pipe.

Water is sprayed on the trash during the summer heat to dilute the stench .

The equipment can also weigh the garbage and even show where it comes from through Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), a wireless automatic-recognition technology.

The kitchen leftovers can be turned into useful materials at the kitchen waste treatment plant, BESAB director Liu Jindong says.

Sprayed with probiotics, the slop stirred in a 4-meter-high fermentor for about 10 hours becomes a kind of meat floss. It then goes to a feed processing plant, where it is made into fine organic feed and microbial inoculum.

These are used on gardens around the capital to cultivate strawberries, peaches and apples.

A study by the Beijing Municipal Commission of City Administration and Environment has determined the daily production of municipal waste in the capital for 2011 decreased to 17,400 tons, 900 tons fewer than 2010.

It's not all good news, however.

Zhonghai Fenglian is running a pilot program sorting trash in Beijing's Haidian district, but resident Hou Qixiao complains the new plastic trash bins handed out by the local authorities are not suitable.

"We can't wait to dump the food waste when the green 10-liter bins are filled up, because it gets so smelly," Hou says. "But the constant dumping of half-full bags of waste means plastic pollution."

Although residents carefully divide domestic garbage into recyclables, kitchen waste and other waste, a collection truck mixes the waste and just dumps it at a nearby site.

No one complained about this until 10 months ago when food waste collections were reduced from once a day to twice a week.

As a result, community residents have to put up with smelly leftovers overflowing from the bins and decomposing in a smelly mess.

"It's worse on hot days and freezes in the winter," says Cheng Mouhong, a property manager in the community. "Residents say they are embarrassed when relatives visit because of the garbage."

Cheng claims there are just three food-waste recycling trucks serving Haidian's 400 pilot communities.

He says the communities in northwest Beijing are overlooked, and the production of waste exceeds the disposal and treatment of it.

Xue Wenjuan, a housewife in the community, loves online shopping, but says there was nothing she could do about disposing of cardboard packaging until the NGO Friends of Nature (FON) launched a green recycling day initiative in early 2011.

Zhang Boju, director of FON, first tried compostable and recyclable separation.

"But most residents were reluctant to comply, because the wet waste is so gooey and dirty," he says.

So the organization finally decided to accede to an idea promoted by the community to separate recyclable waste from the rest, rather than deal with wet waste.

Volunteers from FON go to the community once every two weeks to collect recyclable waste and give out a card, called the "green account", to residents coming for waste disposal.

"The more recyclable waste people dispose of, the more points are recorded on the card," says Lin Youzhu, a college student who has been working as a volunteer collector for seven months.

Residents can exchange the points into gifts from FON.

"More than 300 households applied for the account," Zhang says. "I hope the government pays more attention to initiatives like this and improves its garbage management."