Local residents in China's capital may start thinking twice before throwing an apple core into a bin for non-recyclable garbage as they may soon face a fine up to 200 yuan (US$30).

To encourage garbage classification in the city, the Legal Affairs Office of the Beijing Municipal Government has published a draft regulation seeking advice and suggestions from the public before Dec. 17.

Zhou Jidong, director of the office, was quoted by Saturday's China Daily as saying that the move aims to prompt awareness of garbage separation.

The draft stipulates that any units or individuals in the city should pay a waste disposal fee for the waste they produce, though the amount was not specified.

It says the capital will introduce a household waste classification system, with separate bins for recyclable waste, kitchen waste and other waste set up in residential areas.

Any unit that fails to sort waste or puts waste into the wrong bin will face a fine from 5,000 yuan to 50,000 yuan.

An individual will be fined from 20 yuan to 200 yuan.

The country loses 20 billion yuan each year due to the lack of a recycling system to reuse urban trash, according to a report released by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in May.

China produces more than 152 million tons of garbage every year, which has been increasing by 8 to 10 percent annually in recent years, said a report by the Beijing-based China Science Center of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences.

With rapid growth in the urban population, the treatment of household garbage has become a headache for city administrators.

For example, rubbish landfills in Beijing occupy more than 1,300 hectares of land and the area is increasing by 33 hectares every year.

Beijing plans to involve 300 community rubbish-recycling stations in a "Renewable Resource Recycling Day" this year, to encourage people to recycle rubbish near their homes.

However, the city's non-recyclable rubbish bins are still filled with paper and fruit peels, while food leftovers are dumped into the recyclable bins.

"I don't think people are unwilling to sort their garbage, they are just puzzled about what trash can be recycled and what can't be," Bai Meng, a 27-year-old Beijinger, told the newspaper.

"There are three kinds of rubbish bins in our community with signs reading 'recycling', 'non-recycling' and 'others', but I still don't know which one I should throw a battery and a Coke bottle into," she said.

Liu Yu, who works in a Beijing-based public relations company, said he was discouraged by some municipal administrators who end up mixing the sorted waste when collecting and transporting it.

"It's unfair to only blame the residents' poor awareness before the government invests enough in equipping more garbage trucks to handle recycling," he said.

(Xinhua News Agency November 20, 2010)