An increase in garbage sales was recorded on Chinese marketplaces (5 photos)

Remember how we used to hand in waste paper and batteries at school? Now imagine what would happen if this good event were taken to the brink of absurdity, what do you think would happen?





In short, Chinese schools have been actively pursuing a policy of eco-initiatives in recent years. Children must meet standards for collecting trash, such as waste paper, pens with writing on them, and other junk. But what if your family doesn't drink milk, and your child needs to hand in 30 cleaned milk cartons?

In some cases, schools require each student to collect dozens or even hundreds of pieces of used plastic every month. If they fail, it could affect their grades — and possibly their teacher's.



If there's demand, there's supply, and the sly Chinese have found a way out of this situation. Tired parents simply buy already sorted and cleaned trash on local marketplaces and scold schools on social media for their draconian methods of instilling environmental education in children.





For example, a pack of 100 cleaned milk cartons on the classifieds platform costs 30 yuan, while 100 pen refills cost 20 yuan. The services are so popular that trash products sometimes become top sellers.

Lin Ya, a 33-year-old primary school teacher in Shanghai, said some schools have set recycling collection quotas and now evaluate teachers partly based on their ability to meet those quotas.

“This puts a lot of pressure on teachers,” Lin said. "It is also difficult for children who do not like to drink milk to complete the tasks."



At Pinduoduo, a store that specializes in selling empty milk cartons, empty milk cartons are sold for 100 pieces and can cost as much as 45.9 yuan. In the descriptions of these empty milk cartons, most of them emphasize that they do "environmental protection work" and "reduce the burden on parents."



Sellers note that among their customers are also PTAs. They can buy 5,000 or even tens of thousands at a time. When the school requires homework, the class turns in the required number. Mission accomplished, but the value of environmental protection is completely negated.

The same situation occurs with used pens. In order to quickly use up the pen refills and replenish the account, one of Du Yanbin's former students said that he would take the pen and write in a notebook when he had nothing better to do. He said that some students would go to the toilet to blow out the ink from the pen refills. For a while, he bought AD calcium milk to hand in his empty pen refills. The straw that came with the milk was relatively hard. You could attach a writing tip and hand it in as an empty pen. "The teacher doesn't care whether your pen refills are real or not, as long as you have enough refills." But this problem was solved when he found used pens on sale. He bought hundreds of empty refills for only ten yuan and handed them in every three days until graduation.