SHENYANG, Aug. 17 (Xinhua) -- A used pesticide bottle is worth little as recycled material. Collecting, transporting and disposing of it can cost more than it is worth.
The economics are difficult right from the start. In Chaoyang, a farming city in northeast China's Liaoning Province, farms and villages are widely dispersed, while used pesticide containers are small, scattered and sometimes still carry chemical residue.
Local authorities are testing one option for dealing with this challenge: put collection points as close to the fields as possible.
Across the city, 4,228 village collection sheds funnel used pesticide containers into 143 township stations, the first steps in a system designed to keep them out of fields and waterways.
"For the first time, bottles, cans, barrels and bags once scattered around the fields have a fixed place to go close to the farmland," said Shang Da, head of the rural development division of the Chaoyang municipal agriculture and rural affairs bureau.
Distance matters. Sending county or township vehicles from household to household would be costly and inefficient, while collection points only in township centers could be too far away for farmers to use regularly, Shang explained. By putting the sheds close to the fields, Chaoyang is trying to make proper disposal easier at the point where the waste is generated.
Yet building these sheds deals with only one dimension of the waste disposal challenge, namely by providing farmers with somewhere nearby to place the used containers. Once they have done so, there is the need to figure out who will manage them, how often this waste should be collected and where it ultimately ends up.
"If a shed lacks rainproof or seepage-control measures, if records are unclear, or if the waste is not transported away promptly once the shed is full, the shed itself could become a new pollution point," said Liu Xuelei, Party chief of Xiawa Village in Chaoyang's Taohuatu Township.
National regulations set out responsibilities for how such waste should be collected and handled.
Measures issued by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in 2020 assign responsibilities to pesticide producers, sellers and users, require counties, townships and villages to reasonably arrange collection points, and require sellers and collection stations to keep records of volumes and destinations for at least two years.
Other regions in China are exploring different approaches to pesticide-packaging collection and disposal.
In Yichang, central China's Hubei Province, more than 2,000 collection points have been incorporated into an electronic record system. Local authorities have encouraged 14 agricultural-input firms to form a specialized recycling and treatment company, while incentives including one yuan (about 15 U.S. cents) per 500 grams of returned packaging and redeemable points are used to encourage farmers to participate.
Over the past few years, the city's pesticide-packaging recovery rate has reached 82.8 percent, with the waste treated through high-temperature incineration for harmless disposal and energy use.
In Jindong District of Jinhua, east China's Zhejiang Province, meanwhile, specially designed collection sheds are being made to keep out rain and prevent leaks and spillage. Records of pesticide purchases are compared with packaging returns, while farmers who have bought more but returned less are reminded to hand in the remaining containers.
"Villagers are already used to returning empty pesticide bottles and bags for money," said Ding Jianguo, head of an agricultural-input outlet in Jindong. "It is now uncommon to see them discarded casually in the village."
The collection push comes at a time when China is also seeking to reduce its use of agricultural chemicals. Data from the National Bureau of Statistics show that agricultural fertilizer use fell to 49.71 million tonnes in 2025, down 5.3 percent from 2020, while pesticide use in crop production declined to 237,500 tonnes.
Zhang Sining, a researcher with the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences, said collection systems require public funding to cover start-up and fallback costs, extended responsibility from producers and business operators, and digital records to reduce oversight costs.
Administrative mobilization may help collect waste during busy farming seasons but is difficult to sustain year-round, she said, while relying entirely on the market would make it hard to cover remote villages where the waste has little value and transport distances are long.
For Chaoyang, the next task is therefore not simply to add more sheds. Xi Haijun, deputy director of the city's agricultural development service center, said the focus will be on adjusting collection frequency according to the farming calendar, keeping records accurately, ensuring the waste has a clear destination, and bringing pesticide producers, sellers and professional treatment companies into a broader cost-sharing mechanism.
The sheds may be small but are playing their part in the bigger challenge of keeping bottles and other containers moving from fields to their final destination. ■
