Several garbage incineration facilities have been set up in suburban areas of the city recently to help solve the city's garbage headache.

Incineration is the most efficient and harmless disposal method at present, said Wu Zhanfeng, a professor of the Thermal Energy Department of Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Wu's department designed and helped to build a garbage incineration plant at Laiguangying Village in a suburban area of Beijing's Chaoyang District.

Thermal energy generated by the disposal process can be used for residential heat or can be turned into electricity. The leftover slag can be made into construction materials such as bricks, Wu said.

Each incinerator made by Wu's department can handle 300 tons of garbage per day and a normal disposal plant will have three or four incinerators.

If every major district of Beijing sets up a garbage incineration plant, the city's garbage problem will be solved, he said.

By the end of 2005, Beijing's urban household refuse is expected to have been rendered completely harmless, while the integrated utilization of industrial solid waste will reach 90 percent, according to the city's 10th Five-Year Plan (2001-05).

At present, more than 80 percent of the city's urban household waste is being disposed of harmlessly, officials with the city's urban management committee said.

But with rapid economic growth and continuing urbanization, the garbage problem is still a major factor threatening the quality of the urban environment and people's health.

Beijing generates more than 8,000 tons of residential garbage every day, or about 3 million tons per year, according to statistics from the city's urban construction management department.

In most areas of China, however, urban garbage is generally handled in landfills and compound fertilizers are produced from organic waste.

But random disposal of garbage takes up large areas of land, and seriously pollutes the air, rivers, lakes and underground water, some cities already have no proper place to put their garbage.

"The waste-disposal market is big in large cities in China such as Beijing, with the potential for creating highly profitable businesses that at the same time will help protect the environment," Wu said.

(China Daily 06/19/2001)