Hot Topic Archives: China’s municipal waste management
Principal Consultant in the Office of the Deputy Director General Environment Dr John Ottaway spent four months in China late last year examining developments and progress in municipal waste management and resource recovery.
His extensive visit took him through the wealthy industrialised Zhejiang Province on the east coast of China, to Beijing in the north, through central China coal-mining provinces to the mountain regions of Sichuan, Yunnan and Chongqing, and then southeast through ethnic minority provinces to Hong Kong.
In Chinese cities, recyclable items such as plastics bottles are recovered from the waste stream before reaching landfill.
John said municipal waste management practices in China varied to the extremes.
"The big cities do much better than the towns, and remote villages are fairly typical of practices in undeveloped countries," he said.
"The best of the landfill facilities and resource recovery facilities which I visited seem to be up there with current world’s best practice, and they are still improving."
Dr John Ottaway (second from right) with senior waste managers at a major, state-of-the-art landfill site in Zhejiang.
John said in the cities and towns he visited in China there was intensive recovery of reusable or recyclable resources such as glass bottles, aluminum cans, plastic bottles, paper, cardboard from packaging, plastic bags, styrofoam, old electrical or electronic equipment and old car tyres and so this rubbish was effectively absent from the waste streams arriving at municipal facilities.
"The waste then either goes to landfill, or to waste-to-energy plants, or is composted, with the remainder mostly being either landfilled or incinerated in waste-to-energy plants," he said.
"At some waste-to-energy plants the ash and other residue was mixed into cement or to be used in bricks – hence some Chinese local government areas are actually already achieving zero municipal waste to landfill."
John with senior company executives at a municipal waste-to-energy plant in Chongqing.
John said some practices were undoubtedly creating more major environmental problems to add to China’s already extensive existing list.
"However, to the credit of China’s central and regional governments, they publicly acknowledge the environmental problems they are facing, what they intend to do about them, and the timeframes in which they expect the various environmental issues to be significantly improved," John said.
John said it was encouraging to see the level to which it was possible to recover resources and interesting to compare the techniques used in China with those in WA.
William Wang (left) of the WA Trade Office in Hangzhou, and John Ottaway (fourth from left), with senior waste policy officers from the Zhejiang Environmental Protection Authority.
"It was astonishing to see some local governments actually achieving zero waste to landfill, though perhaps not through techniques WA would want to use," he said.
"Nevertheless, we can learn a lot from the latest developments happening in China, and I am sure we can help them improve their municipal waste management too by sharing what we know."
Adapted from the DECmatters article dated 14th May 2008
