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Breath of fresh air sought in tackling delta pollution

http://thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?we_cat=4&art_id=123790&sid=36837395&con_type=1&d_str=20120626&fc=2

Staff Reporter

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Hong Kong, Guangdong and Macau are going to work together to try to improve air quality in the Greater Pearl River Delta region.

The three governments said in a joint statement yesterday that they have agreed on a plan to reduce polluting emissions in the region by 2020.

That includes pushing vessels calling at ports in the delta to use cleaner fuel.

But doubts remain about action, with one group questioning progress to date.

It was in October 2009 that the governments set about compiling the Outline of the Plan for the Reform and Development of the Pearl River Delta (2008-2020). That was followed last September by three-month public consultations on their initial proposals.

The plan covers long-term co- operation in five major areas: environment and ecology, low-carbon development, culture and social activities, spatial planning and green transportation systems.

It also recommends strengthening regional cooperation on emission- reduction controls.

The grand plan goes on to suggest the joint promotion of low-carbon development by cooperating on a regional basis to combat climate change.

Kitty Poon Kit, undersecretary for the environment, pointed out yesterday this is the first plan compiled jointly by Hong Kong, Guangdong and Macau, that aims to enhance the delta region’s competitiveness and attractiveness.

“The first regional plan jointly puts forward the vision of transforming the Greater PRD region into a low-carbon, high-technology and low-pollution city cluster of quality living,” she said.

Clean Air Network campaign officer Jenny Wong said the 10th meeting of the Hong Kong-Guangdong Joint Working Group on Sustainable Development and Environmental Protection in 2009 saw a study of 2011-2022 emission reduction targets being introduced.

Targets were expected to be set by 2010, she said, yet that remains to be done. And there was no mention of the targets in the plan released yesterday.

Wong also said the Progress Report of Measures under the PRD Regional Air Quality Management Plan – released in January – stated that Hong Kong has already met the 2010 emission reduction targets.

But Hong Kong’s air quality was far from achieving a standard that protected public health, she said.

“In other words, should the 2011-2020 emission reduction targets be based on the lax 2010 emission levels, the targets will have little efficacy in improving Hong Kong’s current air quality situation.”

Dying from Particulate Air Pollution on Hot and Cold Days in Shanghai, China

http://www.co2science.org/articles/V15/N24/C3.php

Reference
Cheng, Y. and Kan, H. 2012. Effect of the interaction between outdoor air pollution and extreme temperature on daily mortality in Shanghai, China. Journal of Epidemiology 22: 28-36.

Background
Noxious air pollution is bad enough under temperature regimes to which people are accustomed; but when the stress of extreme heat or extreme cold is added to the mix, it could logically be expected that the negative effects of air pollution on peoples’ health may be amplified. And the question thus arises: which is the more deadly in this regard, extreme heat or extreme cold?

What was done
In a study designed to answer this question for the inhabitants of Shanghai, China (the country’s largest city), the authors employed a generalized additive model with penalized splines to analyze mortality, air pollution, temperature and covariate data over the period 1 January 2001 through 31 December 2004, focusing on particulate matter of diameter 10 �m or less (which is commonly referred to as PM10) and ozone (O3).

What was learned
Cheng and Kan report that they “did not find a significant interaction between air pollution and higher temperature [>85th percentile days],” but they say that “the interaction between PM10 and extreme low temperature [<15th percentile days] was statistically significant for both total and cause-specific mortality.” More specifically, they found that compared to normal temperature (15th-85th percentile days), a 10-�g/m3 increase in PM10 on extreme low temperature days led to all-cause mortality rising from 0.17% to 0.40%. And they add that “the interaction pattern of O3 with low temperature was similar,” noting that their finding of “a stronger association between air pollution and daily mortality on extremely cold days confirms those of three earlier seasonal analyses in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Athens,” citing the studies of Touloumi et al. (1996), Wong et al. (1999, 2001) and Zhang et al. (2006).

What it means
Not only is extreme coldness in and of itself a greater killer of people than extreme warmness – see Health Effects (Temperature – Hot vs. Cold Weather) [“] in our Subject Index – but it would appear from this study and the others it sites that extreme cold also enhances the killing power of the noxious air pollutants PM10 and ozone.

References
Touloumi, G., Samoli, E. and Katsouyanni, K. 1996. Daily mortality and “winter type” air pollution in Athens, Greece – a time series analysis within the APHEA project. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 50, Supplement 1: 47-51.

Wong, C.M., Ma, S., Hedley, A.J. and Lam, T.H. 1999. Does ozone have any effect on daily hospital admissions for circulatory diseases?Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 53: 580-581.

Wong, C.M., Ma, S., Hedley, A.J. and Lam, T.H. 2001. Effect of air pollution on daily mortality in Hong Kong. Environmental Health Perspectives 109: 335-340.

Zhang, Y., Huang, W., London, S.J., Song, G., Chen, G., Jiang, L., Zhao, N., Chen, B. and Kan, H. 2006. Ozone and daily mortality in Shanghai, China. Environmental Health Perspectives 114: 1227-1232.

Reviewed 13 June 2012

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The clean-up begins on China’s dirty secret – soil pollution

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jun/12/china-soil-pollution-bonn-challenge

A Chinese farmer walks through his crop on the outskirts of Leshan, Sichuan

A farmer in Sichuan, China – one of the regions suffering most from soil contamination. Photograph: David Gray/Reuters

Nowhere is the global push to restore degraded land likely to be more important, complex and expensive than in China, where vast swaths of the soil are contaminated by arsenic and heavy metals from mines and factories.

Scientists told the Guardian that this is likely to prove a bigger long-term problem than air and water pollution, with potentially dire consequences for food production and human health.

Zhou Jianmin, director of the China Soil Association, estimated that one-tenth of China’s farmland was affected. “The country, the government and the public should realise how serious the soil pollution is,” he said. “More areas are being affected, the degree of contamination is intensifying and the range of toxins is increasing.”

Other estimates of soil pollution range as high as 40%, but an official risk assessment is unlikely to be made public for several years.

The government has spent six years on a soil survey involving 30,000 people, but the academics leading the project said they have been forbidden from releasing preliminary findings.

Chen Tongbin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said the worst contamination was in Yunnan, Sichuan, Hunan, Anhui and Guizhou, but there were also parts of Beijing where the soil is tainted.

Unlike in Europe where persistent organic pollutants are the main concern, Chen said China’s worst soil contamination is from arsenic, which is released during the mining of copper, gold and other minerals. Roughly 70% of the world’s arsenic is found in China – and it is increasingly coming to the surface with horrendous consequences.

“When pollution spills cause massive die-offs of fish, the media usually blames cadmium, but that’s wrong. Arsenic is responsible. This is the most dangerous chemical,” he said. The country’s 280,000 mines are most responsible, according to Chen.

But the land – and food chain – are also threatened by lead and heavy metals from factories and overuse of pesticides and fertilisers by farmers. The risks are only slowly becoming well known. The Economic Information Daily reported this week that pollution ruins almost 12bn kilograms of food production each year, causing economic losses of 20 billion yuan.

Chen estimated that “no more than 20% of China’s soil is seriously polluted”, but he warned that the problem was likely to grow because80% of the pollutants in the air and water ended up in the earth.

“The biggest environmental challenge that China faces today is water pollution, but there are efforts underway to control that. In the future, the focus must be on soil pollution because that is much harder to deal with. Soil remediation is an immense and growing challenge.”

Calls for a clean-up of the land are slowly gaining prominence. Huang Hongxiang, a researcher from the Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning, warned earlier this year that China needed to widen its focus from production volumes.

“If we don’t improve the quality of farmland, but only depend on increasing investment and improving technology, then – regardless of whatever super rice, super wheat and other super quality crops we come up with – it will be difficult to guarantee the sustainable development of our nation’s agriculture.”

Chinese airlines seek foreign cabin crew – Telegraph

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/offshorefinance/9316320/Chinese-airlines-seek-foreign-cabin-crew.html

Chinese airlines seek foreign cabin crew

China’s major airlines are looking for foreign cabin crew in a bid to become more international as they expand flights across the globe.

China to build 70 airports by 2015

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/9323617/China-to-build-70-airports-by-2015.html

China will build 70 new airports within the next three years, the head of the country’s aviation watchdog has said, as part of ambitious expansion plans in the industry despite an economic slowdown.

The number of airports in China could reach more than 230 by the end of 2015 Photo: Getty Images

AFP

8:40AM BST 11 Jun 2012

Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) chief Li Jiaxiang also reiterated pledges that carriers would buy on average more than 300 planes a year from 2011 to 2015 – the country’s current five-year economic plan.

“China plans to build 70 new airports in the next few years and to expand 100 existing airports,” he told delegates in Beijing at the annual general meeting of global airline industry group IATA.

He added that the number of airports would reach more than 230 by the end of 2015, and that Chinese carriers would operate around 4,700 planes by then.

The aggressive expansion comes after IATA head Tony Tyler warned that global airline profits would more than halve this year on the back of surging oil prices and the eurozone crisis.

The airline industry in the Asia-Pacific region is expected to turn in a $2bn (£1.3bn) profit in 2012, according to IATA figures released on the sidelines of the AGM, but this still represents less than half of the region’s 2011 profit.

The group did not provide specific projections for the China market – which has so far experienced booming growth due to rising demand for air travel as increasingly affluent Chinese people travel more frequently.

But it said part of the reason behind the projected drop in profits in Asia-Pacific was a slowdown in the Indian and Chinese economies.

Growth in China, the world’s second largest economy, slowed to 8.1pc in the first quarter of 2012 – its slowest pace in nearly three years.

But Ma Kai, a state councillor in charge of economic development, said at the AGM that China’s aviation market had the “biggest growth potential” in the world.

“Ever since 2005, the industry has realised an annual growth rate of 17.5pc,” he said.

“We have contributed to the current development of growth in the global civil aviation industry and will continue to do so for the time to come.”

Li added that by the end of 2011, China had 2,888 commercial planes in operation and its aviation industry employed 1.2m people.

Majority of Chinese Prioritize Environment Over Economy

http://www.gallup.com/poll/155102/Majority-Chinese-Prioritize-Environment-Economy.aspx?version=print

Monday, June 11, 2012 Updated 06:00 PM ET

June 8, 2012

Majority of Chinese Prioritize Environment Over Economy

Yet China faces challenges with rapid urbanization

by Daniela Yu and Anita Pugliese

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Fifty-seven percent of Chinese adults surveyed in 2011 — before the country’s economic slowdown grabbed headlines — prioritized protecting the environment, even at the risk of curbing economic growth. About one in five believed economic growth is more important. Chinese attitudes are typical of those in other emerging-market economies, where residents sided with the environment over the economy in earlier surveys.

Description: Economic growth vs. environment in BRIC countries

Similarly, Americans historically prioritized environment protection over economic growth from 1985 to 2008. However, economic growth has taken priority since the economic recession deepened in 2009. If China’s economic troubles worsen, residents’ attitudes could change too.

Among the 22% of Chinese who did not choose the environment or the economy, about half of them (12%) answered they don’t know. Those who did not have an opinion tended to be poor rural residents with no education beyond elementary school, perhaps indicating their lack of awareness about environmental issues. The 9% who answered neither tended to be wealthy urban residents with high education. For them, it might be a dilemma of choosing one over the other because both the economy and the environment are extremely important.

More Environmental Challenges Lie in Urban Areas

More than three in four (77%) Chinese are satisfied with current efforts to preserve the environment. Residents living in the urban areas, the hub of much of China’s industrial activity, however, are significantly less satisfied than their rural counterparts with these efforts, as well as the quality of the air and water where they live. With good reason: The World Health Organization finds air pollution in Shanghai and Beijing is double or even triple the severity it is in London or Los Angeles. Further, China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection finds groundwater at 57% of its monitoring sites in cities is polluted or extremely polluted.

Description: Environmental satisfaction in urban and rual China

The enormity of China’s challenges as it attempts to balance rapid urbanization, industrial growth, and environmental concerns is even more apparent in its largest cities. In Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou, residents’ satisfaction with the efforts to preserve the environment as well as the quality of air and water significantly trails the national average. Consequently, residents are more likely to say that priority should be given to protecting the environment, even if it risks economic growth.

Description: Environmental satisfaction in China's largest cities

Implications

China still lags behind developed countries in terms of efforts to protect the environment. At the same time, it is investing heavily in new energy sources and low-carbon technologies that could satisfy the substantial power demand from rapid urbanization while protecting the environment and reducing overreliance on coal.

Without aggressive strategies to combat pollution, China’s environmental problems will likely only worsen as its urban areas continue to expand. Comprehensive urbanization policies that focus on conservation and the efficient use of natural resources such as energy, air, water, and land will be necessary to ensure the sustainability and quality of these resources in the future. On a regional level, cities such as Qingdao, Tianjin, and Shenyang are emerging as role models for urban economic and environmental development. They have all have shown leadership in developing best practices in successful green urban planning.

For complete data sets or custom research from the more than 150 countries Gallup continually surveys, please contactSocialandEconomicAnalysis@gallup.com or call 202.715.3030.

Survey Methods

Results in China are based on face-to-face and telephone interviews with approximately 4,200 adults in 2011. In 2010, the results are based on face-to-face interviews with approximately 1,000 adults in Brazil, 2,000 adults in Russia, and 6,000 adults in India. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error in 2011 ranged from ± 2.0 percentage points to ±3.5 percentage points.

For more complete methodology and specific survey dates, please review Gallup’s Country Data Set details.

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Gallup Poll: 57 Percent Of Chinese Believe Environmental Protection Should Be Their Country’s Top Priority

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/06/11/497718/gallup-poll-57-percent-of-chinese-believe-environmental-protection-should-be-their-countrys-top-priority/

Gallup Poll: 57 Percent Of Chinese Believe Environmental Protection Should Be Their Country’s Top Priority

By Climate Guest Blogger on Jun 11, 2012 at 4:26 pm

by Melanie Hart

Description: http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Chinapollution-621x407-300x196.jpg

Gallup has just released new poll results showing that a majority of Chinese citizens care more about cleaning up the environment than they do about growing the economy. Among Chinese adults Gallup surveyed last year, 57 percent believe that protecting the environment should be their country’s priority, even if improving environmental standards slows the pace of economic growth. Only 21 percent believe that economic growth is more important than environmental protection.

These poll results reflect a growing trend in Chinese society. As China climbs up the economic ladder, its citizens are increasingly deciding that economic growth is not enough. Being able to buy bigger houses and higher-end consumer goods is nice, but quality of life is about more than purchasing power. Real quality of life also requires good public health. In China, public health is suffering due to rampant pollution, and the citizens are desperate to change that.

Here in the United States, some anti-regulatory politicians like to claim that removing or weakening our environmental standards would make the United States a more prosperous country.

In reality, however, it doesn’t pay to be rich if you can’t be healthy too. No one knows that more than the Chinese. Ask the Chinese citizens living in cancer villages if losing their friends and relatives to cancer is a worthwhile price to pay for the dirty factory that provides jobs but poisons their villages with lead, cadmium, and other carcinogens.

Since China is not a democracy, Chinese citizens cannot vote their local politicians out of office when local governments allow businesses to emit harmful pollutants that put public health at risk. When that happens, the best option Chinese citizens have is to expose the situation through the media and hope someone in Beijing hears their story and decides to intervene.

Talking about environmental problems in China is tricky, however. Technically, the Chinese government encourages journalists to expose pollution scandals. Beijing generally finds that exposure to be useful, because it is hard for them to get accurate environmental data through official channels. They even have special transparency regulations that are supposed to give Chinese journalists access to environmental impact assessments, pollution monitoring results, and other government data.

Although Chinese leaders support exposing pollution problems in most cases, they are not okay with exposure that damages the central government’s image or sparks mass protests. They are, after all, an authoritarian regime. Because of that, they have “state secrets” regulations that make Chinese journalists liable for how citizens react to the stories they publish. If a media exposé about lead pollution sparks a protest, the journalist who wrote the story could go to jail. That means journalists have to self-sensor their environmental coverage, and citizens do not always have an outlet for exposing this information.

Environmental problems are increasingly seen as life-or-death, however. And that means many people in China are deciding they would rather risk going to jail than watch their children suffer irrevocable neurological damage from lead, mercury, and other pollutants.

When the media cannot fix their problems, Chinese citizens are increasingly taking to the streets in mass protests. We saw this in action in November 2010 when hundreds of citizens protested local government plans to build a waste incinerator near their homes in southern China’s Guangzhou City. We saw it again in December 2011 in Haimen, when Chinese citizens protested plans to build a coal plant.

Public anger is also erupting in the nation’s capital. This past winter, air pollution was so bad in Beijing, pilots could not see the runway at China’s national airport, and air traffic ground to a halt. Despite the obviously horrific conditions, Beijing’s city government rated the pollution as minor. Beijing residents flooded the internet with comments calling on their government to fess up to the fact that conditions were horrible and they were endangering public health. The citizens who posted those comments took a personal risk — any of them could have been punished for subversion, or in Chinese terminology, endangering”‘socialstability

.” Since there were so many of them, however, Beijing officials were forced to side with the people and take action to address the pollution. Now Beijing is planning to close down the city’s coal plants and switch over to natural gas.

When it comes to environmental pollution, the Chinese people are getting serious. They have to — that is the only way they can protect themselves and their children from serious harm.

Here in the United States, we should do everything we can to support their cause. We should also remember that we are lucky to live in a democracy where many of these battles have already been fought and won. That is one of our greatest assets, and it is something many in China are willing to risk everything to achieve.

Melanie Hart is a Policy Analyst for Chinese Climate and Energy Policy at the Center for American Progress

Beijing’s condemnation of US pollution figures a smokescreen for dirty air

SCMP

June 09, 2012

Shooting the messenger is never a good idea, especially when people’s health is at stake. Yet that is what the Chinese government seems intent on doing to US diplomatic missions, which since last year have been issuing data on the smallest and most harmful air pollution particles, PM2.5, in three cities. Deputy Environment Minister Wu Xiaoqing has called for an end to the service, condemning it as a violation of national laws and diplomatic codes of conduct. His criticism is not only unreasonable but unjustified – and worse, ignores the risks posed by poor air in China’s heavily polluted cities.

It was those potential threats to health that prompted first the US embassy in Beijing, and then its consulates in Shanghai and Guangzhou, to fill a gap for American expatriates. Informing about PM2.5 particles, which can lodge deep in the lungs and enter the bloodstream, is common practice in developed countries, but until this year, not on the mainland or in Hong Kong. Chinese officials have collected PM2.5 data, although not released it, instead issuing information about larger PM10 particles, which makes air readings look better than they really are. In Beijing, that meant results were good or excellent 80 per cent of the time, contrasting sharply with those from the embassy showing just 20 per cent of days as acceptable.

Unsurprisingly, word of the discrepancy got around and became a major topic of discussion on microblogs, embarrassing the central government and prompting it to call on cities to follow suit. There nonetheless has remained a gap in readings, explained away as being down to different standards. But whether those of the World Health Organisation are followed, as the US does, or lower ones are adhered to, the fact remains that numbers alone are not enough. Monitoring and releasing information is pointless unless measures are also taken to make the air healthier. A nation’s success relies on the health of its people. Criticising the United States for highlighting a failing is a smokescreen for grievous inaction.

Shanghai Installs PM2.5 Pollution Monitoring Equipment

2012-06-02 02:09:36 Xinhua Web Editor: sunwanming

Shanghai will release readings of PM2.5 — fine airborne particulate matter 2.5 microns or less in diameter — by the end of this year, local environment protection authority said on Friday.

Installation of Shanghai’s main monitoring equipment finished at the end of May and the networking and debugging of the equipment will be conducted in June, said Zhang Quan, head of the Shanghai Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau.

According to Zhang, the sources of the PM2.5 pollution have been initially identified and the city plans to invest more than 10 billion yuan (1.57 billion U.S. dollars) in 50 air pollution clean-up programs.

Beijing began to release hourly PM2.5 readings in January. The PM2.5 gauge is considered stricter than the previous PM10 standard, which monitors larger particulate matter.

The Ministry of Environmental Protection has required 74 cities, including Shanghai, to release PM2.5 monitoring results by the end of December

China’s Largest Waste-To-Energy System Heads For Shenzhen

http://www.epd.gov.hk/eia/register/profile/latest/esb250/esb250.pdf

for comments

ensure that valid points like the following are included in their EIA that they must address

http://titan-machinery.com/en/industry-news/shenzhen-waste-incinerator/

Description: Description: shenzhen

The second phase of the Bao’an Waste-to-Energy Plant, which is invested in by Shenzhen Energy and Environment Company, is expected to be the largest of its kind in China with a daily production capacity of 4,200 tons.

It is learned that Shenzhen produces 12,074 tons of waste are being yielded in Shenzhen every day. Though city has set up seven waste incineration power plants with a total capacity of 4,875 tons per day, it can still not meet the increasing demand.

At present, SEEC incinerates 2,450 tons of waste each day, which accounts for 50% of the city’s total waste incineration. In addition, the company has three projects under construction which are expected to add a daily capacity of 6,300 tons for the city.

Set up in 1997, SEEC is one of the major waste disposal companies in Shenzhen.

China’s Incinerators Loom as a Global Hazard

Description: Description: Description: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/08/12/world/12incinerate01-600.jpg

A worker shoveled trash at the Baoan incinerator in Shenzhen, which also generates power.

O

By KEITH BRADSHER

Published: August 11, 2009

SHENZHEN, China— In this sprawling metropolis in southeastern China stand two hulking brown buildings erected by a private company, theLonggang trash incinerators. They can be smelled a mile away and pour out so much dark smoke and hazardous chemicals that hundreds of local residents recently staged an all-day sit-in, demanding that the incinerators be cleaner and that a planned third incinerator not be built nearby.

Enlarge This Image

Timothy O’Rourke for The New York Times

A truck delivering trash to the Baoan incinerator in Shenzhen, China. The incinerator is relatively clean, but is also costly.

Enlarge This Image

Timothy O’Rourke for The New York Times

Zhong Rigang, the chief engineer at the Baoan incinerator, saw little enthusiasm among the public for recycling.

Enlarge This Image

Timothy O’Rourke for The New York Times

The Longgang incinerators in Shenzhen were the focus of a recent all-day sit-in by hundreds of local residents.

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After surpassing the United States as the world’s largest producer of household garbage, China has embarked on a vast program to build incinerators as landfills run out of space. But these incinerators have become a growing source of toxic emissions, from dioxin to mercury, that can damage the body’s nervous system.

And these pollutants, particularly long-lasting substances like dioxin and mercury, are dangerous not only in China, a growing body of atmospheric research based on satellite observations suggests. They float on air currents across the Pacific to American shores.

Chinese incinerators can be better. At the other end of Shenzhen from Longgang, no smoke is visible from the towering smokestack of the Baoanincinerator, built by a company owned by the municipal government. Government tests show that it emits virtually no dioxin and other pollutants.

But the Baoan incinerator cost 10 times as much as the Longgang incinerators, per ton of trash-burning capacity.

The difference between the Baoan and Longgang incinerators lies at the center of a growing controversy in China. Incinerators are being built to wildly different standards across the country and even across cities like Shenzhen. For years Chinese government regulators have discussed the need to impose tighter limits on emissions. But they have done nothing because of a bureaucratic turf war, a Chinese government official and Chinese incineration experts said.

The Chinese government is struggling to cope with the rapidly rising mountains of trash generated as the world’s most populated country has raced from poverty to rampant consumerism. Beijing officials warned in June that all of the city’s landfills would run out of space within five years.

The governments of several cities with especially affluent, well-educated citizens, including Beijing and Shanghai, are setting pollution standards as strict as Europe’s. Despite those standards, protests against planned incinerators broke out this spring in Beijing and Shanghai as well as Shenzhen.

Increasingly outspoken residents in big cities are deeply distrustful that incinerators will be built and operated to international standards. “It’s hard to say whether this standard will be reached — maybe the incinerator is designed to reach this benchmark, but how do we know it will be properly operated?” said Zhao Yong, a computer server engineer who has become a neighborhood activist in Beijing against plans for an incinerator there.

Yet far dirtier incinerators continue to be built in inland cities where residents have shown little awareness of pollution.

Studies at the University of Washington and the Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill., have estimated that a sixth of the mercury now falling on North American lakes comes from Asia, particularly China, mainly from coal-fired plants and smelters but also from incinerators. Pollution from incinerators also tends to be high in toxic metals like cadmium.

Incinerators play the most important role in emissions of dioxin. Little research has been done on dioxin crossing the Pacific. But analyses of similar chemicals have shown that they can travel very long distances.

A 2005 report from the World Bank warned that if China built incinerators rapidly and did not limit their emissions, worldwide atmospheric levels of dioxin could double. China has since slowed its construction of incinerators and limited their emissions somewhat, but the World Bank has yet to do a follow-up report.

Airborne dioxin is not the only problem from incinerators. The ash left over after combustion is laced with dioxin and other pollutants. Zhong Rigang, the chief engineer at the Baoan incinerator here, said that his operation sent its ash to a special landfill designed to cope with toxic waste. But an academic paper last year by Nie Yongfeng, a Tsinghua University professor and government adviser who sees a need for more incinerators, said that most municipal landfills for toxic waste lacked room for the ash, so the ash was dumped.

Trash incinerators have two advantages that have prompted Japan and much of Europe to embrace them: they occupy much less real estate than landfills, and the heat from burning trash can be used to generate electricity. The Baoan incinerator generates enough power to light 40,000 households.

And landfills have their own environmental hazards. Decay in landfills also releases large quantities of methane, a powerful global warming gas, said Robert McIlvaine, president of McIlvaine Company, an energy consulting firm that calculates the relative costs of addressing disparate environmental hazards. Methane from landfills is a far bigger problem in China than toxic pollutants from incinerators, particularly modern incinerators like those inBaoan, he said.

China’s national regulations still allow incinerators to emit 10 times as much dioxin as incinerators in the European Union; American standards are similar to those in Europe. Tightening of China’s national standards has been stuck for three years in a bureaucratic war between the environment ministry and the main economic planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, said a Beijing official who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the subject publicly.

The agencies agree that tighter standards on dioxin emissions are needed. They disagree on whether the environment ministry should have the power to stop incinerator projects that do not meet tighter standards, the official said, adding that the planning agency wants to retain the power to decide which projects go ahead.

Yan Jianhua, the director of the solid waste treatment expert group in Zhejiang province, a center of incinerator equipment manufacturing in China, defended the industry’s record on dioxin, saying that households that burn their trash outdoors emit far more dioxin.

“Open burning is a bigger problem according to our research,” Professor Yan said, adding that what China really needs is better trash collection so that garbage can be disposed of more reliably.

Critics and admirers of incinerators alike call for more recycling and reduced use of packaging as ways to reduce the daily volume of municipal garbage. Even when not recycled, sorted trash is easier for incinerators to burn cleanly, because the temperature in the furnace can be adjusted more precisely to minimize the formation of dioxin.

Yet the Chinese public has

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/business/energy-environment/12incinerate.html?pagewanted=all

shown little enthusiasm for recycling. As Mr. Zhong, the engineer at the Baoan incinerator, put it, “No one really cares.”

Keppel Seghers is currently one of the leading providers for imported WTE solutions in China. Its in-house technology is supplied for the expansion of an existing WTE plant in Shenzhen, Guangdong.

Keppel Seghers’ technology will enable the facility to treat an additional 3,000 tonnes to the existing 1,200 tonnes of municipal waste per day. When completed, the WTE plant will be the largest in China with an eventual capacity to treat 4,200 tonnes of municipal waste per day.

The existing WTE plant’s key components were also provided by Keppel Seghers in 1999, when it was built. Back then, the plant was also the largest WTE plant in China.

Heated opposition feared for city’s incinerator plan

Updated: 2011-09-17 08:06

By Zheng Caixiong (China Daily)

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SHENZHEN, Guangdong – The government of the special economic zone is having trouble finding a location for the construction of a gigantic garbage incinerator.

Lu Ruifeng, executive deputy mayor of Shenzhen, said the city plans to build the world’s largest garbage incinerator, with a designed capacity to handle more than 5,000 tons of garbage a day.

“But it is really a headache to choose the right location for the project,” Lu said.

Lu made the remarks while meeting with Chen Xiaochuan, vice-chairwoman of the Guangdong Provincial People’s Congress, who was leading a group of deputies from the province’s legislative body to inspect the city’s environmental protection work early this week.

Although Lu did not reveal what the problems were, insiders said the city government worried the project could meet opposition from people living near any chosen location.

In Guangzhou, about 100 kilometers away from Shenzhen, the city government had to postpone construction of a similar project in its Panyu district last year because of residents’ strong opposition.

After the Guangzhou government chose a site in the Panyu district to build its garbage incinerator in late 2009, the overwhelming majority of nearby residents signed a petition to oppose the project. They were worried it would pollute the environment and harm their health.

As a result, the Guangdong provincial government had to make concession and announced it would postpone construction.

The Guangzhou garbage incinerator project had also stirred controversy among environmental experts and scholars.

Zhao Zhangyuan, a retired researcher for the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, said incineration will cause pollution.

“Burning garbage produces many poisonous gases, even when advanced technology and equipment are used,” said Zhao, who strongly opposed construction of the project.

Guangzhou authorities are now looking for a different site to build their garbage incinerator.

But Xu Haiyun, chief engineer with the China Urban Construction Design and Research Institute, said garbage incinerators will not pose health risks because the gases discharged would be strictly in line with the country’s standards.

“There is a garbage incinerator in downtown Bonn, Germany, and similar facilities have been constructed in Japan,” Xu said.

Lu Ruifeng promised Shenzhen’s garbage incinerator would use the world’s most advanced technologies, equipment and management system and uphold the strictest discharge standards to avoid polluting the environment.

“Shenzhen, a densely populated city that lacks land resources, will treat its waste mainly through burning in the future, in addition to burying and composting,” Lu said.

According to Lu, Shenzhen’s treatment rate of consumer waste will exceed 80 percent in 2015.

In addition, a number of garbage treatment facilities will be built or expanded in the coming years.

Yin Qingwei, a Shenzhen white-collar worker, said the city needs to build a big garbage incinerator to deal with its growing garbage problem.

“But the government should carefully consider the public opinion and seek suggestions from residents to choose the right location,” he said.

Construction should not start before the majority of residents have reached an agreement with the government, he added.

China Daily

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Shenzhen plans world’s largest incinerator

Apr 6th, 2012

by Editor.

Choi Chi-yuk and Cheung Chi-fai

Sep 15, 2011

Shenzhen plans to build the “world’s largest” rubbish incinerator, capable of processing 5,000 tonnes a day, in an effort to cope with the almost five million tonnes of domestic waste produced by the city each year.

Lu Ruifeng, the city’s executive vice-mayor, told a group of Guangdong provincial People’s Congress delegates on Tuesday that because its landfills could no longer cope with the growing trash pile produced by its 13 million residents, the city was planning to build the world’s largest incinerator, the Guangzhou-based Nanfang Daily reported yesterday.

Lu said public consultations had been held on site selection. He admitted that where to put the incinerator was one of the most challenging problems for the project.

The Nanfang Daily said Shenzhen planned to build three waste incinerators by 2015 to burn 80 per cent of the city’s rubbish. It said two of the plants would be in Laohukeng andNanshandistrict, both in the west of the city, with the third to be built at an unspecified site in the city’s east.

A report in the Guangzhou Daily said Shenzhen had three waste incineration plants in the pipeline, capable of processing a total of 6,300 tonnes of rubbish a day.

Lu said that in order to meet environmental protection standards for the incinerator’s emissions – smell, liquid, ash residue and airborne ash particles – it would make use of mechanical grate technology to improve combustion. It would also adopt advanced management and stick to the highest global air quality standards, the Nanfang Daily reported.

It said Shenzhen was dealing with 4.8 million tonnes of trash a year.

Michelle Au Wing-tze, senior environmental affairs officer at Friends of the Earth (Hong Kong), said Shenzhen was taking a wrong path in waste management.

“Guangzhou has just started to ask people to separate and recycle waste, but Shenzhen is heading in the opposite direction,” she said.

“It is definitely not an image boost to tell others the incinerator will be the world’s largest.”

Au said that if the incinerator had any adverse environmental impacts, like dioxin pollution, it would not just hit Shenzhen and Hong Kong but could spread far beyond the region.

Last year, the daily per capita waste disposal rate in Shenzhen was 1.26kg, compared to 1.28kgin Hong Kong and 0.77kg in Guangzhou.

Hong Kong is also planning to build a large incinerator, with a capacity of 3,000 tonnes a day, on a reclaimed site at Shek Kwu Chau, south of Lantau Island. Environment officials have not ruled out the need to build an extra incinerator to cope with mounting waste.

Waste incineration projects are a sensitive issue in Guangdong, with proposals for new plants often met by fierce local demonstrations, forcing plans to be put on hold. In January, more than 1,000 residents from two districts of Guangzhou staged separate protests against incinerator projects near their neighbourhoods.

Growing environmental awareness among mainlanders as living standards have improved in recent years have fuelled more protests over environmental concerns.

Copyright (c) 2011. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved