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Residents of the city, one of the world’s biggest with about 23 million people, must arrange their trash according to those labels under a mandatory sorting scheme starting on Jul 1.

China is in the sixth year of a “war on pollution” designed not only to clean up its skies, soil and water but also upgrade its heavy industrial economy and “comprehensively utilise” its resources, including waste.

Improving recycling rates is crucial to China’s strategy, and cities are trying to figure out what to do with the heaps of trash clogging up rivers or buried in hazardous landfills.

Huang Rong, deputy secretary general of the Shanghai government, said on Friday more than 70 per cent of residential districts should be compliant with the new trash sorting rules by next year.

“We are just starting out and we are getting ordinary people used to the new system, so we don’t want to make it too complicated,” he told reporters.

Citizens, however, are finding the new system complicated enough, with every item of waste now under careful scrutiny, from receipts and half-eaten crayfish to soggy cups of bubble tea. Residents are also unhappy about getting their hands dirty.

“It’s really a lot of trouble,” said a 68-year old resident called Shen. “Plastic bags have to be put in one bin and if they are dirty they must be cleaned out, and then your hands get filthy. It’s really unhygienic.”

Though Shanghai has hired 1,700 instructors and conducted 13,000 training sessions, confused residents on social media are demanding to know how to sort items like batteries, human hair, meat on a bone, or fruit seeds and skins. The government has set up an app to handle enquiries.

Shanghai aims to eventually burn or recycle all waste. By next year, dry waste incineration and wet waste treatment rates are expected to reach 27,800 tonnes a day, around 80 per cent of the city’s total garbage. The city will also restrict the amount of single-use plastic cutlery that food service companies give out, starting on Monday.

China is building hundreds of “waste to energy” plants that use garbage to generate power. It is also establishing a “waste-free city” scheme and constructing high-tech “comprehensive utilisation bases” across the country.

It also slashed imported waste volumes - once as much as 60 million tonnes a year - to encourage recyclers to tackle growing volumes of domestic trash instead.

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