Last year Nick Sinclair travelled on a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship to document the world of street recycling. The people who attempt to profit from the debris of the streets of the new Chinese cities are the rural poor who have come there to find work. Without the education or the contacts to find formal work, many of them find a niche gathering discarded plastic, cardboard and metals from wherever they find them. Sinclair writes:

The recyclers trade; paper, card, plastic, wire, metals and occasionally higher value items like computers and air-conditioning machines. A long day spent buying and collecting door to door and then selling on to recycling depots, will typically generate about $4. Even in China this is a miniscule income, however, the people involved are entrepreneurs and optimists. Somehow they manage to survive and there is always the promise of making more money tomorrow.

The idea that recycling is a cool thing to do in the West, does not figure in China, nor does it make any sense to these people who have to work all hours and in all weathers. If the recyclers could make a better living doing something else they would. To the wealthy urban Chinese, these people are of such low status that they are all but invisible. My first few days in China, I didn’t see them either, but once I started to see their bicycles and tricycles and hear their bells ringing and their calls, it became clear they were everywhere. As we become increasingly aware of the significance of global warming, it is notable that their way of life is sustainable and has a positive impact on the environment.

Whilst the poor have always been expert at making do, recent falls in commodity prices can only mean that for the recyclers life has just got even harder. In the current market, many materials will no longer be viable to collect and trade, illustrating that the free market is often not a suitable mechanism to protect either the poor or the environment.

He adds, via email:

One year on and  I imagine that things are very different. There is a lot at stake in China. Prosperity, or the promise of it, is an issue of national pride and also for that matter public order. From what I saw the Chinese are by disposition very hard working, stoic and pragmatic. They appear to take the view that growth is so important they have to put up with some upheaval in the meantime. What will happen if things start to unravel is big question. Currently I believe growth has dropped from 10% to 9% - if we can trust official figures. Whatever the case the Chinese have become used to growth increasing and not falling.

From an environmental point of view the picture is very complicated. Less economic activity means potentially reduced consumption of raw materials and energy, which potentially slows the progression to environmental degradation. However, it also means commodity values drop and as we are seeing in the UK, when that happens many materials cease to be viable for re-cycling. What appeared to be the case in China during my visit was that recycling provided the poor who had moved to the city with an entry into work and entrepreneurialism - a good thing on the face of it. However this was always problematic, areas where recycling was widespread were frequently about to be redeveloped, seeing the poor displaced by richer (higher consuming populations) and the sheer (growing) numbers of people involved meant that recyclers were constantly obliged to undercut their rivals. It was already apparent to me that the free market could not be relied upon to protect the interests of either the poor or the broader environment and tragically current drops in commodity prices will further demonstrate that point. The poor in China and elsewhere are frequently forced to live in degraded environments and are hardest hit by economic turmoil as their means of survival is especially vulnerable to changed economic conditions.

My work and experience also brought home to me how our worlds are so interconnected. We in the West consume goods that people in China make for us. Containers full of goods arrive down the road from where I live in Felixstowe and return laden with waste paper and metal for the Chinese to reprocess - or at least until recently. This global process has brought much yearned for prosperity to the Chinese and helped keep our economy moving. But, whilst this process goes on out of sight, there is much damage being done to the world's environment and if that is the case then we are at least partially to blame, by virtue of what we consume.

Finally, my personal experience was that I found the sight of the people working so hard to make a few dollars from recycling humbling and I have to remind myself of that everytime I feel a whinge coming on about what we regards as hard times a coming in the UK.

Sinclair's book Megacycle is published via Blurb.