The republic’s poor record in this area means not only that valuable materials in such items, such as gold and copper, are going up in smoke, but also that hazardous waste in some components, including mercury, is being incinerated and polluting the atmosphere.

“A regulated system is… needed to ensure that consumers are provided with convenient means to recycle their e-waste, and the e-waste collected is channelled to proper recycling facilities where safety and environmental standards are adhered to,” said the National Environment Agency (NEA).

Households here produce some 30,000 tonnes of e-waste a year – half of the total amount generated, equivalent to the weight of 110 Airbus 380planes.

But most people have no clue what to do with it. Auditor Rachel Lim, 24, for one, does not know what to do with old electronic goods. “I know it shouldn’t go in the dustbin, so I just keep it,” she said.

According to NEA’s recent survey of 1,600 consumers, only a tiny portion of e-waste – just 6 per cent – is sent for recycling.

To turn things around, the government is looking to countries like Sweden – which has a sterling 52 per cent recycling rate for e-waste, and Denmark, where the figure is 43 per cent. Both countries harness an “Extended Producer Responsibility” (EPR) strategy, where producers such as brand owners and manufacturers are responsible for ensuring that their products get recycled.

If applied to consumers here, this may mean they will have to mail smaller products to recyclers for free. Retailers might have to provide e-waste collection points in stores, and one-for-one take-back services for large items such as refrigerators.

The wheels have been set in motion, with the NEA announcing that it is assessing the suitability of overseas practices with the Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources through consultations with industry stakeholders.

These discussions will be extended to the public next month.

The NEA said this will ensure that e-waste collected is recycled safely at proper recycling facilities.

The survey found that e-waste was generally given to deliverymen to cart away, or thrown away. Such items also end up with scrap traders and rag-and-bone men, who lack the skills to fully recycle the items, and may end up discharging harmful chemical compounds or disposing of them with general waste.

Worse, if e-waste is incinerated, it would add to carbon emissions and contaminate the ash at the Semakau landfill, NEA warned. Recycling facility TES-AMM’s group chief operating officer Gary Steele applauded the move towards regulation: “Enforcing legislation and having EPR schemes make it more visible for people so they will want to deal with it properly.”

And some consumers are keen for the changes to happen. Said Miss Lim: “If recycling e-waste is convenient, such as having |the bins around my housing estate, I would of course consider doing it.”

NTT Docomo Inc, with a governmental subsidy for the model project, developed a smartphone app that can be used until the end of February, and will evaluate the project’s effect.

The project, called “EcoBuy,” started at a Mini Piago supermarket in Chuo Ward, Tokyo. Stickers with such phrases as “Item for EcoBuy — its best-before date must be within the following period of days” are put on the store shelves for 30 designated food items including daily dishes, sliced raw fish and milk.

The best-before date represents the period of time during which foods can be best enjoyed. The consume-by date is labeled on perishable foods.

A homemaker visiting the store said, “I’d like to buy the items if it can help reduce food loss.” Terushi Ito, the president of 99ICHIBA Co, which runs the store, said, “If we can reduce the volume of food waste, the labour cost for disposing of it will also be decreased.”

To join the project, consumers using the app take pictures of best-before dates and consume-by dates of the food items as well as the relevant receipt, then send the pictures to the designated center. After the center confirms the purchase, the consumer will receive points equivalent to about 20 percent of the purchase amount.

The Tokyo metropolitan government will pay NTT Docomo up to 15 million yen for the project. Shops bear the cost of allowing customers to apply the points to later purchases. The app has functions of showing the customers latest information about the food items for the model project, alerting them that the best-before dates and consume-by dates of the items they purchased are approaching, and providing recipes for the items. “We seek to reduce food waste not only at shops but also at home so as to cut food loss in society as a whole,” an NTT Docomo official said. “We would like to confirm how much we can cut the amount of food loss and the project’s profitability through the experiment,” said an official at the government’s bureau of environment.

6m tonnes wasted

An estimated total of 6.21 million tonnes of food is wasted a year in Japan, prompting measures to be taken by food makers and retailers, according to the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry.The figure is about twice the amount of food the United Nations provides worldwide. It is also equivalent to a bowl of rice being discarded by every person every day.

Various measures are being taken to reduce the amount of food that is wasted. In May, the ministry and other organisations requested the food industry relax the practice of not delivering to retailers food that is close to its best-before date. In Kyoto, retailers extended the sales periods of food until close to their best-before and consume-by dates in a pilot programme conducted in November and December.

Some companies in the food distribution industry and food manufacturers have deleted the “day” and only indicate the month and year in best-before dates in an effort to reduce the amount of food that has no quality problems but remains unsold and has to be discarded.

“I’ve had a wide variety of interests since childhood. I’ve got used to doing different things,” says the 33-year-old.

Although she’s an established science-fiction writer by now, she’s never thought of quitting her job as an economic researcher at the government-sponsored charity, the China Development Research Foundation. Based in Beijing, the work gives her the opportunity to meet many interesting people, she says.

Hao gets the time to write only after her regular working hours, which means sleeping less at night.

Her latest book, The Other Shore for Humans, which was published in November by China Citic Press, is an anthology of six novelettes on artificial intelligence and two scientific articles on the issue.

“It mainly deals with the relationship, including the conflict, between humans and AI,” says Shen Chan, the book’s editor.

“It will guide the readers to think about our great advantages as people and what we most value.”

Hao is planning a new novel on the origins of civilisations. She says sci-fi will be her focus in the future as well, but she will also explore “realistic writing”.

“I like to imagine a different world, and that’s the charm of sci-fi. But I don’t like to read sci-fi that only depicts a purely imagined world with no connection to reality.

“Daily life has always been an important inspiration for my writing,” Hao says, adding that the characters in her award-winning Folding Beijing novelette were developed from people she met.

Folding Beijing originally appeared in the BBS website of Tsinghua University in 2012 and was published three years later in Uncanny Magazine with an English translation by Chinese-American sci-fi writer and translator Ken Liu. It brought a breakthrough in her writing career and the top global award in the genre.

This work, which took her around “one month to plan and three days to write”, tells the story of a father’s struggle to send his daughter to school in a futuristic Beijing-also an allusion to the difficulties that some Chinese parents are undergoing today to ensure their children receive a high-quality education.

It was the suburban housing community where she lived then that inspired her to write the story. She found her neighbours’ lives in sharp contrast with those living downtown, where she works.

“It occurred to me that in our world, some groups of people actually have no interaction with other groups, and they are not willing to learn about each other. So, I decided to write about the isolation,” Hao says.

The Hugo Award came as a big surprise to her and has brought important changes to her life.

“I thought it would just be an award, noticed only by people in the field. I didn’t expect it to bring this huge attention,” she says.

After the award, Hao, who had an interest in poverty studies, was offered the chance to set up a program initially funded by a Chinese auto company, with the aim of educating rural children in poor areas.

The programme started in Bijie city in Southwest China’s Guizhou province and has been expanding. It has sent teachers to impoverished places to train local teachers as well.

Hao says writing sci-fi combines her love of science and her dream to become a writer.

Writing has been an important part of her life since she was a teenager.

Hao won the national New Concept Award for writing when she was in high school. She started writing sci-fi in 2006, when she did her physics major at Tsinghua University.

She continued her studies for her master’s degree in physics and then economics for her PhD at Tsinghua.

Hao developed a strong interest in astrophysics after she read a book about the universe as a child. She started reading science fiction in high school. Hao devoted much of her time to writing novels in her university years. But to take advantage of her academic background, she started to write sci-fi then.

“Sci-fi opened a whole new world for me,” says Hao.

Her stories cannot be simply generalised as sci-fi, fables or by any particular literary tag, according to Beijing-based sci-fi author Chen Qiufan. Because they indicate her close observation and awareness of real life, Chen says.

The change to the Facebook newsfeed came as the online giant seeks to address charges that it has failed – along with Google and Twitter – to prevent the spread of bogus news, most strikingly ahead of the 2016 election in the United States, Agence France-Presse reported.

In a Facebook post, co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the network would seek to “prioritize news that is trustworthy, informative, and local.”

The new “trusted sources” ranking aims to “make sure the news you see, while less overall, is high quality” and “helps build a sense of common ground” rather than sow division, Zuckerberg said.To do so, he said, Facebook decided to rely on member surveys as the most “objective” way to rank trust in news sources.