Capital fires up plans for waste incinerators
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The construction of the Asuwei garbage incineration plant in Changping district is scheduled to kick off this year, despite controversy that has lingered since the project was announced last August.
The information was published in a government document regarding Beijing's plan for the treatment of household waste in 2010. The document was dated May 5, but it was not released on the municipal government's Web portal until Tuesday.
The document shows that the building of the second stage of another incineration plant in Shunyi district will also begin this year. Plans for the Nangong incineration plant in Daxing district will also be advanced.
Household waste has increased 8 percent a year through 2008, reaching a total 6.72 million tons, according to the Beijing Municipal Commission of City Administration. Only in 2009 did the city witness a decline, of 0.5 percent, in the amount of garbage.
Still, the huge amount of garbage is overburdening the city's 23 waste treatment plants, officials said. The municipal government believes 40 plants, including the proposed 10-billion-yuan Asuwei project, are needed by 2015.
"For the government, burning garbage is such an easy solution," Zhao Zhangyuan, a retired expert previously with the Ministry of Environmental Protection, told METRO on Wednesday.
"The best way to handle domestic waste is sorting and recycling, but it requires the government to take the lead and design a whole system," Zhao said, noting a series of policies should be made by the government to reuse garbage as a resource.
He said that burning is the most expensive way to handle domestic waste.
"An incinerator is priced at 1 billion yuan and it is also a waste of garbage, not to mention it can put people's lives in danger due to the hazardous emissions," he said.
However, Huang Xiaoshan, a lawyer who was arrested last year for protesting against the Asuwei incineration plant, which will be built near his house, said Beijing would not take action to build those incineration plants until it gets permits and understanding from the public.
"The central government announced in June that all decisions regarding the treatment of garbage should be published in China Environment News and discussed among all Chinese people," said Huang.
"There's no way the Beijing government can do it without the knowledge of its residents," he said confidently.
Statistics from the municipal administration committee show that 94.1 percent of household waste in Beijing goes to landfills; 3.9 percent is used for composting while 2 percent is burned in incineration plants.
The Gao'antun incineration plant in east Beijing's Chaoyang district and the Shunyi domestic waste incineration plant are the only two now working in Beijing.
At full capacity, Gao'antun, which was launched in 2006, burns 1,600 tons of waste every day. Authorities have not revealed how much rubbish the plant now incinerates.
"I hadn't heard about the incineration plant in Shunyi until 2008. It started operations after the Beijing Olympics," said Mao Da, an environmental activist at Nature University, a nongovernmental organization in Beijing.
"If they are not properly controlled, the two incineration plants can damage the health of all the people in Beijing, let alone the Nangong incineration plant, which is scheduled to be finished in 2015," Mao said.
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