BEIJING //When Zhu Xuemei moved to the Chinese capital, she was looking for "a better life and a better job", but things have not turned out as she hoped.
Now working as a scavenger on a landfill site in the far south of Beijing, she spends her days knee-deep in a stinking mixture of greasy plastic bags, packaging, rotting fruit peel and used toilet paper.
Her job is to separate out anything worth keeping - including drinks cans, glass jars, plastic bags and old food trays. For this, the 41-year-old from a village in southern Sichuan province earns about 700 yuan (Dh 403) a month.
"This wasn't what I expected. I came to Beijing to earn some money but it's very hard to find suitable work," she said.
The scavengers, about a dozen of them at this landfill in Daxing district, constantly turn over the rubbish using pitchforks, throwing useful items into vast sacks arranged around them. There are flies everywhere and even a chicken pecking at the rubbish. Lorries full of yet more rubbish arrive regularly.
The newly wealthy residents of urban China are producing more rubbish than ever before. And most of it ends up in landfills like this.
According to estimates from campaigners, Beijing produces 30,000 tonnes of waste each day, and with the quantity growing about 8 per cent a year, the capital's rubbish dumps are filling up fast. Reports indicate just 4 per cent of Beijing's rubbish is recycled.
"China in a short time went from very poor to very rich. It has a lot of pent-up hunger to have things. There's this desire to consume stuff and much of it ends up in landfills," said Wang Jiuliang, a local filmmaker who made a documentary based on visiting more than 400 landfills around Beijing.
"It's difficult for the authorities to keep up. China has embarked on a consumer-based society, but it hasn't done the necessary homework, it hasn't prepared for these types of consumers."
His film, Beijing Besieged by Waste, is being screened in the UAE capital on Wednesday and Friday as part of the Abu Dhabi Film Festival.
There are fears the filling up of the landfills is having wider consequences, in particular that some are leaking pollutants into the groundwater.
Landfills are also suspected of causing respiratory problems, said Li Bo, director of the Beijing pressure group Friends of Nature, with "phenomenally high" rates of asthma in areas close to dumps.
"The landfill problem is very serious," he said. "We're concerned about the landfill mega-projects that emit very smelly odours and it's very harmful."
With some campaigners saying Beijing's landfill sites will be full within five years, officials have set a target that 40 per cent of waste will be burnt at incinerators. Yet this raises concerns over the release of hazardous substances, such as the potentially carcinogenic dioxins produced from burning plastics.
While the authorities have in some cases responded to protests by the public and cancelled or put on hold planned incinerators, Mr Li said scores more large-scale facilities were in the pipeline nationwide.
The ultimate answer, says Mr Wang, is to produce less rubbish, and he believes this can only come about if producers are made responsible for the rubbish they generate. In some developed countries such as the United Kingdom, businesses that produce packaging can be prosecuted if they do not take steps to recover and recycle waste their activities generate. Examples Mr Wang has come across seem to illustrate the fact that certain companies are not held to account for their actions.
"If you fly business class, you get a pair of slippers and you see just a single pair of slippers. If you go to some of these landfills, you see 100,000 pairs of these slippers. They are just sitting there rotting," he said.
