China’s war on trash goes hi-tech with AI-driven apps for sorting and facial recognition to enforce recycling

Chinese consumers are spoiled with apps for just about everything they need to do in daily life – and that now includes sorting trash.

After Shanghai residents complained about the difficulty in sorting waste into four categories under a new rule that came into effect July 1, China’s biggest internet companies jumped in with apps to help out.

Residents who fail to follow the new rules – which require waste to be binned according to four categories of biodegradable, dry, toxic and recyclable – face hefty fines and a possible reduction in their social credit scores.

Tencent, which operates the ubiquitous messaging app WeChat, introduced a mini-program, Master of Trash Sorting, for users in the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, which instructs them how waste should be sorted and disposed of based on key words.

Alipay, the financial arm of Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post, announced earlier that it had deployed its artificial intelligence and augmented reality technologies to a mini program for waste sorting in Shanghai and other cities in China. Users scan waste items using cameras on their smartphones to learn which category the rubbish belongs to.

Alipay said the mini program, which has indexed more than 4,000 different types of waste to date, has assisted more than three million people since its beta test phase in early July. Alipay also launched another mini program that enables people in 16 cities across China to sell recyclable waste from their homes.