China's burning issue: Scorch the garbage?

By Meng Jing

A worker sorts through a garbage stream of glass and metal that will be burned in an incineration plant in Datong, Shanxi province. Fan Minda / Xinhua
Effort to incinerate waste to generate power gains ground, creating opportunities for foreign firms

The CEO of the largest waste management company in the world has one of the more unique answers to China's growing garbage problem.

"If you don't want garbage around you, why don't you eat your own garbage?" joked Jorge Mora, Asia CEO of Veolia Environnement.

For Mora, it was a joke to a very serious issue in China. As an executive at Veolia, which builds incineration plants and mainly builds landfills and landfill gas-to-energy plants in China, Mora has often heard the grumblings and opposition about incineration plants. It creates too much air pollutants, some say. Don't build it in my backyard, others say.

But in China, there has been very little progress in tackling how to recycle and sort garbage, coupled with the fact that there is also less and less available space for landfills. China overtook the United States in garbage output in 2004 and the amount of garbage has been rising at a clip of 8 to 10 percent a year.

Around 238 million tons of household garbage was produced in 2009 in China. The country's disposal facilities, according to China Association of Environmental Protection Industry (CAEPI), are capable of processing only 112 million tons.

Many in the garbage industry, such as Mora, are calling for more incineration plants. To them, burning waste materials is the viable way to go, though environmentalists are firmly opposed to the practice.

"It is not about whether you like (incineration plants) or not. There is just no way out," Mora says.

As the world's second largest economy rapidly develops, consumption has skyrocketed. In its wake is an output of garbage that is building and building.

And according to CAEPI, there is actually more untreated garbage if annual figures take into account counties and towns, which are usually not well-equipped with disposal facilities.

The picture becomes bleaker by 2015 when about one-third of China's 700 landfills will reach their capacity, according to China International Engineering Consulting Corp.