A power station which burns rubbish to generate electricity is set to be built in the capital of Sichuan Province.

Bidders are being invited from around the world to build the station, which will be located in Luodai Town of Longquanyi District in Chengdu.

It will be southwest China's largest power station.

Project leaders believe it will cost about 520 million yuan (US$64 million) to build, becoming the first station in Chengdu to generate power by burning domestic waste.

Covering 7 hectares, it will burn 1,200 tons of rubbish a day, about one third of the city's daily garbage production, said Deng Tianping, deputy chief of Chengdu Cityscape Bureau.

The station will remove recyclable materials from the rubbish such as metals and plastic, then bury the remaining waste. After the rubbish has fermented, the station will collect methane through a pipe before drying out and burning the rubbish.

After clearing smoke arising from the burning process, the remaining heat will be used to generate electricity.

Construction of the station is expected to take two years. It will be built with the BOT (Build, Operate and Transfer) mode. Upon completion of the station's construction, investors can operate it for 25 years, Deng said.

Chengdu produces about 3,200 tons of rubbish a day, and the amount of rubbish being produced rises by 5 percent every year.

At present, it buries all the rubbish. The annual cost of disposing of waste amounts to 30 million yuan (US$3.7 million), with 10 further hectares of land needed each year to bury it.

But by burning one ton of rubbish, the city can generate about 20 kilowatt-hours of electricity. The process of burning rubbish will be handled in a sealed environment and will not cause pollution, Deng said.

The station, which will burn more than 400,000 tons of waste a year to generate more than 8.6 million kilowatt-hours of electricity, will be a solution to the problem of its disposal in Chengdu and remedy the present power shortage in the city, said Zhou Xianyuan, president of Chengdu Environmental Protection Research Institute.

Burying and burning, which is the common practice of rubbish disposal, does not solve the problem of secondary pollution, he said.

According to the Chengdu Muncipal Planning Commission, Chengdu has lagged behind many parts of the country in the use of rubbish to generate electricity. Chongqing, Shandong, Jiangsu and Fujian provinces have established their own power stations using waste as the fuel.

Companies from both home and abroad are competing to win the bid to build the station. The city has invited experts in environmental protection and power agencies to process their applications, said a source from the commission.

(China Daily December 7, 2005)