For residents of Nuanshui Village in Jiangxi Province, plastic bags, beverage cans and cigarette ends are not waste but treasure that can be exchanged for goods at a "waste bank," which has been opened in April 2016 as Chinese villages work to improve the government’s waste management. Villagers can collect trash and deposit it at the bank in exchange for credit towards items including soap, tissues, rice wine, pencils and notebooks, and eighty used plastic bags or 40 batteries or 200 cigarette ends can be exchanged for a bar of soap. The situation in Nuanshui is typical of large parts of rural China. It lacks funds for organized garbage collection, and residents are not in the habit of disposing of waste in bins. Littering and fly-tipping are common. Now however, many villagers have stopped tossing out trash indiscriminately and are even starting to compete with each other to see how much garbage they can pick up from the streets. The Ministry of Housing and Urban-rural Development estimates that China has a permanent rural population of 650 million. If they produce 0.5 kg of household waste per capita every day, around 110 million tonnes of trash will be generated every year. However, nearly 64 percent of rural China's trash is left untreated. The system in Jiangxi has great potential to be replicated elsewhere.

Source: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2016-05/27/c_135393673.htm