With the rapid advancement of urbanization, economic development, and the improvement of per capita income, as well as the upgrading of consumption patterns, the amount of urban household waste generated in China continues to increase.

The amount of household waste is huge, with a wide variety of types and complex components, mainly including kitchen waste, recyclables, non recyclables, and hazardous waste. Although recyclables have considerable reuse value, due to the mixing of dry and wet components and severe adhesion, the sorted resource products have low purity and poor quality.

The recycling and screening system in some cities is still in its initial stage, with few garbage sorting facilities and professional recycling companies, resulting in a large amount of valuable garbage being wasted. For example, items such as paper, plastic, and metal that should have been recycled often end up in landfills or incinerators due to inaccurate classification and poor recycling channels.

At present, there are approximately 3000 domestic waste treatment facilities in operation nationwide, of which incineration accounts for about 60% and landfill still accounts for over 30%. However, the problem of uneven distribution of treatment facilities is prominent, with strong incineration capacity in the eastern region, while landfill remains the main method in the central and western regions. Taking Guangdong Province as an example, its domestic waste incineration treatment rate has reached over 85%, while some western provinces still rely on landfill treatment. However, the higher the water content in garbage, the harder it is to increase the temperature of garbage incineration, which not only increases the cost of electricity for garbage incineration, but also easily produces dioxins, causing serious environmental pollution problems.

To solve the problem of household waste, on the one hand, we need to steadily promote the classification of household waste, standardize the way of garbage classification and disposal, and increase the proportion of recyclable materials separately disposed of.

As a key link in the resource utilization of garbage, sorting and screening technology has gone through three stages of development:

-The first generation mainly relied on manual sorting and simple screening, with low efficiency and harsh working environments;

-The second generation introduces physical separation methods such as magnetic separation and air separation, increasing the processing capacity to 50 tons/hour;

-The current third-generation intelligent sorting system combines AI visual recognition, near-infrared spectroscopy and other technologies, with a sorting accuracy of over 95%.

In the context of ecological civilization construction, the solid waste sorting and screening industry is transforming from an auxiliary industry to a key node of circular economy. It is expected that by 2030, several billion level professional equipment manufacturing groups will be formed, driving the scale of the renewable resources industry to exceed trillions. The implementation of this process requires not only the coordinated efforts of policy guidance and market mechanisms, but also the deep interaction of technological innovation and public participation. Only by building a complete value chain of "fine sorting high-value utilization market recognition" can we truly achieve a magnificent transformation of garbage from a "governance burden" to an "urban mineral".