Garbage, pollution woes deepen as economy grows

(Ecns.cn)--As the economy flourishes, so does the trash in Lifan Village of Hubei Province.

"Lifan used to be a beautiful place surrounded by green mountains, where a small river rises and flows through the village," a reporter at the Southern Weekend, who was brought up there, revealed last Thursday.

Poor, backward and isolated as Lifan was, humans and nature were fairly balanced there until 1985, when the first road to the village was paved and the area was suddenly hooked up to the grid power supply.

From then on, a growing number of villagers began to find jobs in cities and bringing money back, which consequently stimulated the development of the local economy.

In the last five years, almost every family has made a fortune and built a two or three-story foreign-style house, noted the reporter.

As a result, garbage has gradually piled up in this otherwise pristine village. Industrial waste--which is difficult and costly to recycle--such as rubber, batteries and glass now litter the country roads. Fields also lie uncultivated, contaminated by toxic muck.

Elsewhere, the Zhanglidong Village in Henan Province also went from heaven to hell in a short period; in less than five years, the Zhengzhou Comprehensive Waste Treatment Landfill overwhelmed this village of about 1,000 people. Peaches and cherries rotted on trees, infested with insect life drawn by the smell, reported the Associated Press (AP) in 2009.

"Visitors can smell this village long before they see it," commented the AP.

As more Chinese ride the nation's economic boom, a torrent of garbage is one result. The amount of paper, plastic and other garbage has more than tripled in two decades, said Nie Yongfeng, a waste management expert at Tsinghua University.

Statistics from the Ministry of Health show that in 2007 the amount of domestic waste in Shanghai was equal to five Jinmao Towers, a 420.5-meter high skyscraper that covers an area of 23,611 square meters.

The data also reveal that waste produced in China's villages already amounted to 300 million tons a year, despite the fact that at least 85 percent of urban garbage was also dumped in rural areas.

Americans are still way ahead of China when it comes to garbage though; a population less than a quarter the size of China's 1.3 billion generated 254 million tons of garbage in 2007, a third of which was recycled or composted, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Thousands of farmers in the central province of Hubei clashed with police in 2008 over illegal dumping near their homes, as the landfills had not only poisoned the air and ground, but damaged their health as well.

According to the Southern Weekend, an increasing number of residents in Lifan Village had contracted cancer as of August 2010 because of pollution caused by waste, and altogether 37 had died since 1994.

In 2007, residents in central Beijing swarmed the offices of the Ministry of Environment, protesting the stench from a landfill and plans for a new incinerator there. Officials later had to scrap the incinerator plan and close the landfill four years early.

Much of China's huge amount of trash ends up in unlicensed dumps in the countryside, and most have only thin linings of plastic or fiberglass. Rain drips heavy metals, ammonia and bacteria into the groundwater and soil, and the decomposing stew sends out methane and carbon dioxide, explained the AP.

A Chinese government study added that regulations allow incinerators to emit 10 times the level of dioxins permitted in the U.S., and these release cancer-causing dioxins and other poisons.

"If the government doesn't step up efforts to solve our garbage woes, China will likely face an impending health crisis in the coming decade," said Liu Yangsheng, an expert in waste management at Peking University.

Busy Chinese families are shifting from fresh to packaged foods, consumption of which rose 10.8 percent a year from 2000 to 2008, well above the 4.2 percent average in Asia, revealed figures from the Hong Kong Trade Development Council. By 2013, the packaged-food market is expected to reach US$195 billion, up 74 percent from 2012.

"Trash was never complicated before, because we didn't have supermarkets, we didn't have fancy packaging and endless things to buy," said Nie Yongfeng.

Garbage used to be rotten vegetables and fruit, which are easy to break down by nature. But now wastes are mainly plastic products and chemicals that could takes tens or hundreds of years to degrade.