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As recently as the 2000s, the majority of Chinese still lived in the countryside;
in 1990, just 26 percent of them officially lived in the cities. But decades of
remarkable urbanization have, according to the China statistical yearbook of
2016, left 56.1 percent of Chinese living in cities. But with cities comes trash—as
of 2004, China was already the world’s largest municipal solid waste generator,
according to the World Bank.
In China, garbage is commonly handled via landfills (60.16 percent) or
incineration (29.84 percent), and sometimes untreated discharge (8.21 percent),
with the proportion of each shifting every year. Because landfills can no longer
keep up with the demands of growing cities, incineration is on the rise. Some
argue that incineration is more economically efficient, as it reduces the volume
of waste after burning by up to 90 percent, while reducing the weight by 70
percent, thus saving a lot of land resources. Coupled with energy recovered
through incineration, waste-to-energy power plants have spread throughout
China’s new cities. Although the Chinese government has tried to promote
such facilities as a clean way to get rid of waste, civil society has often opposed
the construction of new incinerators, for fear that they will lead to even more
pollution. Protests have broken out across China, in Hubei, Hunan,
Guangdong, Hainan and elsewhere, against plans to build new incinerators.
On July 18, 2018, the Wuhu Ecology Center released its fourth observation
report on the “Information Disclosure and Pollutant Discharge of 359 Domestic
Waste Incineration Plants.” According to the report, China is currently host to
359 waste incinerators, distributed across 29 provinces, direct-administered
municipalities, and autonomous regions. In private, experts say that by 2020,
China will have about 500 incinerators, although this information has not been
made public by any government official. On the other hand, the number of
landfills is expected to peak at around 2,400, and then slightly decrease to
about 2,000, as some of them will soon reach saturation point.
Andreea Leonte is a fellow for China studies at the Romanian Institute for the Study of the Asia-Pacific.
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