Ranks of four coloured bins stand outside Chinese residential compounds, in hotel corridors and on station concourses. This site has never described them — not under waste, not under recycling, not under any English word for rubbish, and not under 垃圾分类 (lājī fēnlèi, waste sorting).
Two questions decide whether you can use them: who is obliged to sort, and who decides what the categories are. The answers come from different places, and that is the whole reason a visitor gets it wrong.
The duty is national, and it names you#
The instrument is the 中华人民共和国固体废物污染环境防治法 (Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó gùtǐ fèiwù wūrǎn huánjìng fángzhì fǎ, Law on the Prevention and Control of Environmental Pollution by Solid Waste), revised on 29 April 2020 and in force from 1 September 2020.
Article 43 tells governments to build the system:
县级以上地方人民政府应当加快建立分类投放、分类收集、分类运输、分类处理的生活垃圾管理系统，实现生活垃圾分类制度有效覆盖。
Local governments at county level and above are to build a household waste system that is sorted at deposit, at collection, in transport and in treatment, and to achieve effective coverage of the sorting regime. Note the four stages: the article requires the separation to be carried through collection and transport, not only at the bin.
Article 49 is the one that reaches the person holding the bag:
That is unusually direct for an environmental statute. There is no threshold, no exemption for visitors, and the prohibition on dumping and burning is absolute rather than conditional.
The categories are a different question#
Here is where it stops being national.
The signage standard is GB/T 19095-2019, 《生活垃圾分类标志》, Marking for municipal solid waste classification. Its record on the national standards platform gives it as published 18 October 2019, in force from 1 December 2019, administered by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development.
Read the number again. It is a GB/T, not a GB — the suffix this site keeps returning to, which marks a standard as recommended rather than compulsory. The thing that tells you which bin is which is, in national terms, advice.
Shanghai's environmental authority, reporting the standard's release, sets out what it did:
生活垃圾类别调整为可回收物、有害垃圾、厨余垃圾和其他垃圾4大类和11个小类
The categories were adjusted to recyclables, hazardous waste, kitchen waste and other waste — four major categories and eleven sub-categories.
Shanghai calls two of them something else#
The practical consequence is small and real. What the national instrument standardises is the marking — its title is 生活垃圾分类标志, marking for household waste classification — while the binding words come from the city. So where a sorting station carries symbols or photographs as well as characters, those are the part the national text is about.
What goes where, in the terms the texts use#
- 可回收物 — paper, plastic, glass, metal and textiles, in Shanghai's own words: waste suitable for recovery and recycling.
- 有害垃圾 — batteries, lamp tubes, medicines, paint and their containers: things that harm health or the environment directly or potentially.
- 湿垃圾 / 厨余垃圾 — food scraps, leftovers, expired food, peel and cores, plants, and spent Chinese medicine dregs. The medicine dregs are a genuinely Chinese entry in a waste category, and they are in the statute.
- 干垃圾 / 其他垃圾 — everything that is none of the above. Shanghai defines it by subtraction, which is the honest way to define it.
Where this touches the rest of the site#
Kitchen waste has a price attached to it elsewhere. The Anti-Food Waste Law lets a caterer charge a customer who causes obvious waste the cost of handling the kitchen waste — that discretion, and the article it sits in, is the same 厨余垃圾 category as the third bin.
Packaging is being pushed up the chain. The express delivery regulation acquired a chapter on packaging in 2025, with reporting on the use and recovery of single-use plastics — the parcel that arrives at your hotel now has a recovery regime behind it.
Shanghai is the city where the wording diverges, because it legislated its own categories before the national standard came into force — worth knowing before a first morning there.
In practice#
- Use the symbols where they are there. The national instrument is a marking standard, so the graphic side of a sorting station is the part it addresses; the wording is the city's.
- Learn two characters, not four categories. 湿 (wet) and 干 (dry) in Shanghai; 厨余 (kitchen) and 其他 (other) under the national standard.
- Batteries and lamp tubes are not general rubbish anywhere. They are the hazardous category in both vocabularies, named in the same words.
- Do not leave a bag beside the bins. Dumping, scattering and piling up are prohibited by the national law rather than by a local by-law.
- In a hotel, the housekeeping trolley does the sorting, so the thing that matters is the corridor station rather than the bin in the room.
- The rule that a sorted deposit must stay sorted is in the law too — the last sentence of Article 49 says so in terms.
- Hong Kong and Macau legislate waste separately, so neither the duty nor the categories above describe a bin there.
Checked for newer, and what I could not read#
Articles 43 and 49 of the Solid Waste Law were read on the Ministry of Ecology and Environment's own copy and cross-checked character for character against the Ministry of Commerce's legal database. The two agree exactly on both, and both carry the same dates: second revision 29 April 2020, in force 1 September 2020.
GB/T 19095-2019 was read on the national standards full-text platform, which gives the number, title, status, publication and implementation dates and the administering ministry. As with the last standard this site looked at, that record carries no field labelled 标准性质 — the field stating whether a standard is compulsory or recommended — so the GB/T prefix is doing that work here rather than an explicit statement.
Two passages rest on one host each, and are quoted above in full for that reason. The four-category sentence was read on the Shanghai municipal ecology and environment bureau's report of the standard's release. Article 4 of the Shanghai regulations was read on the same bureau's copy of the local statute.
Two things this page does not attempt. It gives no penalty figures, because those are set locally and vary; and it does not list the eleven sub-categories, because the standard's own text was not readable from here — only the count was, from the bureau's report.
Frequently asked questions#
Do you have to sort rubbish in China?#
Yes, and the duty falls on individuals by name. Article 49 of the Solid Waste Law requires units, households and individuals producing household waste to perform source-reduction and sorted-deposit duties, and requires any unit or individual to deposit household waste sorted at the designated place. Dumping, scattering, piling up and burning are prohibited outright.
What are the four rubbish categories in China?#
Recyclables, hazardous waste, kitchen waste and other waste, with eleven sub-categories under them, as adjusted by the 2019 marking standard. Shanghai's own regulations use recyclables, hazardous waste, wet waste and dry waste — the first two identical, the last two named differently for the same things.
Why does Shanghai say wet and dry waste?#
Because Shanghai legislated first. Its regulations were passed on 31 January 2019 and took effect on 1 July 2019, months before the national marking standard came into force on 1 December 2019, and its Article 4 defines wet waste as perishable waste and dry waste as "that is, other waste".
Is rubbish sorting compulsory in China?#
The duty to sort is, under the national law. The marking standard that tells you which bin is which is a GB/T, which makes it recommended rather than compulsory, and the binding categories in any given city come from that city's own rules.
What counts as hazardous waste in China?#
Waste batteries, lamp tubes, medicines, and paint and its containers are the examples the Shanghai statute gives, defined as waste causing direct or potential harm to human health or the natural environment. The category is named identically in both vocabularies.
Does sorted rubbish actually stay sorted in China?#
The law requires it to. The last sentence of Article 49 provides that household waste which has been deposited sorted must be collected, transported and treated sorted, and Article 43 tells local governments to build a system that separates at all four of those stages.