Cleaner Greener China

Learning that China’s landfills are an environmentally mixed bag should come as no surprise to anyone, a story that Eastday’s article Landfill sites fail green screenfocuses on, but more alarmingly, though this article the size of the problem becomes apparent:

China generated more than 150 million tons of household trash last year, as well as 1.9 billion tons of industrial waste, said the Ministry of Environment Protection in its 2008 China Environment Report.

Experts estimate that, due to rapid economic growth, the nation’s volume of trash is rising more than 8 percent annually and, in less than five years, the total amount will be 50 percent more than today.

An issue that Beijing is already having to grapple with:

With space running out in its 13 landfills, Beijing should build new waste treatment facilities and find ways to reduce garbage discharge or the city may run out of space to dump refuse within 4 years, a municipal management official warned yesterday.

Beijing generates 6.57 million tons of garbage every year (18,000 tons a day). These figures are increasing at an annual rate of 8 percent, according to figures provided by Wei Panming, deputy chief of the Environmental Sanitation Facilities Division under the municipal management committee.

Yikes.