Protests in Xiantao, Hubei Province over a waste incineration plant have still not died down, and residents of Zhaoqing, South China's Guangdong Province have in recent days taken to the streets to show their opposition to a proposed incinerator in their city.
The government of Zhaoqing's Lubu township released an announcement on July 2, saying that it will halt the transfer of land for the waste incineration plant - a move taken by many local governments when faced with fierce resistance to similar projects in the past.
China has recently witnessed a string of protests across the country against trash incinerators despite local governments' pledges that they will not do significant harm to the environment.
Experts have called for the authorities to adopt different methods of waste management rather than trying to persuade the public to accept incinerators.
Garbage burnt
"More and more garbage is being produced due to urbanization and incineration seems the most convenient way to deal with the waste," Chen Liwen, a researcher with Nature University, a Beijing-based environmental protection association, told the Global Times on Wednesday.
Residents of Guangzhou and Shenzhen produce up to 8 million tons of garbage every year and Beijing's 22 million residents produce 18,400 tons daily, finance.qq.com reported.
Incineration plants have some advantages - they are relatively small, cremated garbage takes up less space and they can produce heat or electricity, according to the report.
"Private incinerators have proliferated in recent years due to the stimulus of government policies and the lure of profits," Zhang Boju, chief executive director of environmentalist NGO Friends of Nature, told the Global Times on Wednesday.
According to a document released by the General Office of the State Council in April 2012, 35 percent of China's garbage should be burnt to generate power and this proportion should reach at least 45 percent in more developed eastern regions.
Waste incineration is lucrative as operators receive both government subsidies and can earn money from the public through channels such as garbage collection fees, said Zhang.
However incinerators can have a negative influence on the environment and if waste is not burnt properly it can produce many pollutants, including heavy metals, dioxins and ash, Zhao Zhangyuan, a research fellow at the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, told the Global Times.
Dumping burned trash into landfills or otherwise dealing with it in an inappropriate fashion can cause secondary pollution and affect the health of those living in nearby communities, said Zhao.
Government oversight
Poor government supervision of existing incinerators and the spottiness of reports about the emissions that these projects cause have increased public worries and distrust, Tian Qian, an employee of the Wuhu Ecology Center, said at a news conference on Wednesday.
The Wuhu Ecology Center and Friends of Nature jointly released reports on incinerators in China in 2013, 2015 and 2016.
The 2016 report said that less than 40 percent of the 231 incineration plants in the country are subject to monitoring and waste incineration plants in East China's Zhejiang and Fujian provinces in the first quarter exceeded emissions standards thousands of times.
"We should not overlook the influence of incinerators. The continuing protests against them all prove that the government's past efforts to deal with waste have gone astray," said Chen.
Chen added that more than 50 percent of daily garbage is food waste and 20 percent could be recycled, which means that some sorting could reduce the total amount of waste and make dealing with it more efficient.
However most people in China know little about sorting their waste for recycling and there are no rules to encourage people to do it, Chen told the Global Times.
The National Development and Reform Commission and Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development jointly released draft regulations on promoting compulsory garbage sorting in China in June.
According to the draft, compulsory garbage sorting should be implemented in key cities by the end of 2020, with 35 percent of garbage being recycled by that year.
Several experts said to the Global Times that more detailed and strict regulations should be carried out as soon as possible in a bid to force all of society to participate in the battle against the increasing amount of waste produced by ordinary people.
