Farmers in Damiao Village in Yexie Town are as good at recycling as they are at sowing.

From eight-year-old kids to 80-year-old graybeards, the town’s residents are participants in Songjiang’s first rural recycling program.

Garbage is first sorted into organic and inorganic waste, and then the inorganic waste is further sorted into recyclable, dry and hazardous. The wet waste is poured into fertilizer tanks for decomposition.

“If I get confused, I just look at the pictures on the dustbins,” said Fang Jun, 10. “It’s easy.”

Daily trash has been reduced from 1.3 tons to about half a ton, and organic waste has decreased by almost 50 percent.

The village currently has 10 fertilizer tanks, which produce more than 10 tons of compost a year. Every four or five months, the tanks are opened and the decomposing waste is stirred to accelerate its breakdown.

The recycling program has made villagers more conscious of garbage. Littering in the town has also decreased dramatically.

In addition, Yexie Town is handling the treatment of wet garbage from four downtown communities. Every day about 60 tons of wet garbage is transported to the town, where it is sorted for composting.

The compost is used to fertilize public greenbelts in Songjiang. The district’s wet garbage treatment capacity has grown from 40 tons a day in 2012 to more than 300 tons today.

Rural recycling is now being promoted to more villages in Songjiang. Yaojing Village in Maogang Town is one of the latest to adopt the practice.

“Some older people have difficulty remembering how to sort what, so we go to their homes to help them,” said Xia Yuanlin, one of the villagers assigned to do daily inspections of trash sorting.