A 12-year-old girl has taken a job collecting garbage to support her parents, both of them cancer patients, and her baby brother.

Every afternoon, Xiao Sheng carries 23 heavy containers of waste from every corner of a community in downtown Hefei, capital of Anhui province, to a roadside loading site, where a waiting truck takes the garbage away for treatment.

The containers weigh at least 50 kg each and the job is tiring, even for adults. But the girl, who is barely taller than the containers, has been doing the job for more than a year.