Clear The Air News Blog Rotating Header Image

August 31st, 2012:

China Daily story today

From: Doug Meigs [mailto:dougmeigs@gmail.com]
Sent: 31 August, 2012 12:03
To: Martin Williams
Cc: Rosa Ma; James Middleton; David Wu; Basil Hui; Tom Hope
Subject: Re: China Daily story today – thanks for your help!

Hello,

The China Daily video supplement was a bit delayed, but is now uploaded to the site and youtube now. Here’s a link: http://bit.ly/O08B2U – with Martin and Patrick from SARDA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TvcYfBkT-k&feature=player_embedded

Thanks again!

-Doug

On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 4:19 PM, Martin Williams <martin@drmartinwilliams.com> wrote:

Hi Doug:

Many thanks for this info; much appreciated.

I’ve always figured Cheung Chau as being pretty much out of the loop as far as the Heung Yee Kuk goes; thinking of northwest and north New Territories as prime HKY areas [more associated with rice farming, I’d thought – maybe wrongly]

Still, very interesting to learn of this.

Bit like the Masons in Britain [especially], or something!?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemasonry

– likewise, with some secrecy and involvement of business folk, all too easy to come up with conspiracy theories…

And yes, seems things had been going along as if the EPD incinerator itinerary would be followed nicely: trips to see incinerators, happy island “leaders” and so forth, along with professors [whose views may be influenced by their grants… ….]

Indeed true that EPD seems to have aimed for another incinerator; first get one at SKC with little opposition, say “Hey, this is fabulous”, and then try n railroad next one through at Tuen Mun, before then wondering where to put the next one [given so little effort into recycling etc]

Whether can get a genuine reconsideration, who knows; but as you’ve seen, I’ve circulated your article to a few people, hope it can help slow momentum {now behind the scenes] towards the SKC monster!’

All the best,

Martin

Dr Martin Williams. Writing. Photography. Multimedia.
Recognised as an Outstanding Earth Champion by the Earth Champions Foundation
Cheung Chau, Hong Kong; tel 96201824

DocMartin – Passion for the Wild, PR for the Planet
Hong Kong Outdoors – Wild About Hong Kong
Cheung Chau HK – South China Sea Island in Hong Kong

On 24 Aug 2012, at 3:38 PM, Doug Meigs wrote:

Hello, here’s my story from today, about how and why Shek Kwu Chau’s resident rehab facility opposes the incinerator plan: http://bit.ly/PLa5fw

Thanks for all your help with this story. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to weave the trip-funding debacle into this feature because of deadline concerns and word-count. I will pay close attention to the issue.

Here’s some more info on the HKIDA – it was established in 1996 to ensure a stable handover to China, take an involvement in Islands District political, cultural and national issues… the HKIDA chairman Mr. Leung told me that rural committee chairmen of the islands district – i.e. Heung Yee Kuk folks – pay a “donation” in order to receive honorary board positions. That’s why there are so many Heung Yee Kuk folks in charge (Daniel Lam was the chairman off-and-on over the years). Last year they took a “study trip” to Zhuhai in relation to the Zhuhai-HK-Macau bridge. And last week they co-organized the Silvermine Beach festival. Mr. Leung said that Randy Yu just had to help out at the meeting Rosa observed as part of his duties with the organization. The goals/board of the HKIDA sound like a Heung Yee Kuk committee, but Leung said they are not affiliated despite the large number of members. They sound like an uber-nationalistic group, and I expect they are reluctant to take advise from a bunch of green foreign barbarians

It seems that either the HKIDA is part of a huge conspiracy for infrastructure jobs and/or to avoid putting the incinerator near the domain of Lau Wong Fat, Randy’s father-in-law… OR…  these HKIDA folks are simply uninformed about the alternatives. After all, Prof. Johnathan Wong has no faith in plasma arch technology, and he’s a key govt. advisor based on all his funding received.

My guess is that it’s a bit of both, along with a suspicion that it was Edward Yau and the EPD’s plan all along was to build in Shek Kwu Chau AND the Tsang Tsui spot.

If you find any more info to help substantiate the HKIDA and incinerator collusion, please share it with me.

Thanks again!

-Doug

6195 2777

Cementing a strong business in China

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012-08/23/content_15700550.htm

Description: Cementing a strong business in China

The Harbin-Dalian High-speed Railway under construction in Shenyang, capital of Liaoning province. China’s generous investment in infrastructure and housing nurtured the nation’s cement industry, which now has 3,800 producers and more than 2.9 billion tons of production capacity annually. Provided to China Daily

100-year-old company sees greener future for building materials industry in the nation

Nearly all the companies that our grandparents admired have disappeared because of the fast pace of change in today’s world.

“For a company that lives 100 years, it has to evolve through time,” said Ian Riley, China country head of Switzerland-based Holcim Group, one of the world’s largest cement producers and the archrival of France’s Lafarge SA.

Riley shared the simple secret at Holcim’s centennial celebration in Beijing recently. He is ready to develop the company’s China business into something more environmentally friendly. His plan is to turn garbage into an alternative fuel, replacing coal to produce cement.

“The vision we have in the future is that we can clean up the environment while at the same time produce reliable building materials,” said the 54-year-old British senior executive.

More than 100 years ago, Holcim opened its first plant in a small village in Switzerland called Holderbank, producing 90,000 tons of cement in its first year of operation.

Today, the company’s annual cement production capacity has reached 216 million tons with 149 plants plus 492 aggregates factories and 1,435 ready-mix concrete production centers in 80 countries.

“The longevity and the success of the company is not necessarily a secret. It is 100 years of very hard work and commitment and evolution to understand what the needs of today’s society may be,” said Riley.

For Riley, who has been involved with the China business since 1994 and moved to the country in 1998, China’s needs for the sustainable development of its cement industry are pretty clear.

The National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top economic planning agency, has already demanded a better environmental performance by the heavy industry that uses not only a massive amount of energy and resources for production but also emits a huge volume of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide.

Most importantly, the Chinese government sees the cement industry as a potentially large contributor to solving problems in municipal waste, which can be turned into alternative fuels. The technology can also help reduce CO2 emissions.

CO2 emissions from China’s cement industry account for about one-eighth of the country’s industrial output of carbon dioxide, according to a recent paper by Chris Nielsen, executive director of the China Project with Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Science.

According to the 12th Five-Year Development Plan of China’s Cement Industry (2011-15), the country, which currently has hardly any co-processing production lines that burn waste in the making of cement, will see around 10 percent of its cement production lines equipped with this technology by 2015.

“If you think about all those things that the Chinese government wants companies to do that require good technology and good management, there are a lot of excellent opportunities indeed for companies such as ours,” Riley said.

As early as the late 1990s, the company and nine other big cement makers co-founded the world’s first ever green initiative for the cement industry.

The Geneva-based Cement Sustainability Initiative, which develops guidelines for implementing greater efficiency measures through cooperation and sharing expertise among members, has since been regarded as the global pioneer for the sustainable development of the cement industry.

Apart from Holcim’s well-established advantages in green cement production, the company’s belief in the cement market potential in China is another driving force for Holcim’sevolution in the country.

China’s robust economic growth over the past several years has nurtured the world’s largest cement industry because of its generous investment in infrastructure and housing, the biggest users of the product.

Concrete, which is made from cement, aggregates and water, is the second-most consumed material in the world after water, according to the Cement Sustainability Initiative.

Cement demand in China has grown by double digits each year over the past decade, in line with the economy’s annual average growth rate of 10.7 percent, according to the China Cement Association.

China has the world’s largest cement industry with 3,800 cement producers and more than 2.9 billion tons of cement production capacity, which accounts for more than half of the world’s total.

However, a slowdown in China’s economy, which is predicted to grow at an average annual rate of 7.5 percent between 2011 and 2015, is likely to result in shrinking investment in housing and infrastructure, thus oversupply of cement is getting more and more serious.

“With the rebalancing of the economy, it is crystal clear that the golden era for the cement industry is gone. But the tough times will reshape it into a more sustainable and quality-focused industry in China,” said Lei Qianzhi, president of China Cement Association.

The number of cement producers in China has decreased to 3,800 over the past two to three years due to mergers and acquisitions. The top 10 cement makers in China have a 25 percent lock on production capacity in the nation, up from 15 percent in 2005. The top makers are expected to have a 35 percent market share by 2015, the 12th Five-Year Plan said.

Thanks to mergers and acquisitions, China National Building Materials Group Corp, with businesses in cement and other construction materials, was ranked 485th in the Fortune 500 list in 2011. It became the first Chinese building materials company to appear on the list. The company consolidated 154 small and medium-sized companies in eastern China over the past three years into its South Cement Co Ltd based in Shanghai. The conglomerate produced 138 million tons of cement last year.

CNBM Vice-President Cui Xingtai said in March that the group aims to increase its cement production capacity from 300 million tons a year to 500 million by 2015.

In the newly released list of the Global Fortune 500 in 2012, CNBM climbed to 365th place with $30.02 billion in revenue in 2011. Holcim was placed 474th with $23.38 billion and Lafarge was 480th with $22.97 billion.

“Through M&As, major players are able to control larger markets. By getting rid of outdated capacity and smartly reducing the actual production volume, cement can be sold at a better price. Price wars will not be as frequent,” said Sun Tieshi, vice-president of China Building Material Federation.

But not every company in this capital-intensive industry is able to purchase hundreds of cement factories to increase their competitiveness. Western players in the nation’s cement industry are focusing on sustainable development in the construction industry to get ahead.

Sang Kang, CEO of Lafarge Shui On Cement, a joint venture between Lafarge and Hong Kong-based Socam Development Ltd, told China Daily that the company will look to accelerate its development in sustainable construction in China. Faced with overcapacity, he said, companies that can upgrade their production models can better survive a downturn.

He views China as one of its key markets. The nation contributed 6 percent of Lafarge’s global revenue in 2011, up from 2.4 percent in 2006.

Lafarge opened its first overseas sustainable construction development laboratory in Chongqing last September to develop new and advanced construction materials, products and solutions for its customers in China.

The company is currently producing dust-free cement, and a product line of concretes that it claims provides more strength and durability.

China is one of Holcim’s top markets in the world, contributing more than 20 billion Swiss francs ($21.69 billion) in 2011. Senior executives from the company reckon cement demand in China has already reached its peak.

“The current market is flat. As the market continues to flatten, the nature of competition will change. The values of sustainability and environmental performance will play a much bigger role for a company’s further development,” said Ian Thackwray, Holcim’s president for Asia-Pacific and South Africa.

The company entered China in 1995 and formed a strategic partnership with Hubei-based Huaxin Cement Co Ltd, which is one of China’s oldest cement companies with a history of more than 100 years.

By investing in Huaxin, Holcim became the Chinese company’s largest shareholder with 39 percent of its total shares in 2008.

The partnership has helped Huaxin Cement to achieve a steady annual growth of 30 percent in revenue over the past eight years. It had a capacity of 60 million tons last year, ranking the company in the top 10 among Chinese cement enterprises.

Holcim is clearly confident in its Chinese partner and its strategy in China. Despite a rather sluggish market with an acute oversupply in cement production capacity, Holcimreinvested in Huaxin in December to raise its shares to 42 percent of the total.

“We’ve already seen the slowing down of the Chinese economy is affecting the construction business. So maintaining 30 percent growth in sales this year is difficult but may be achievable,” said Riley, who joined Holcim in 2006 and works as the vice-president of Huaxin Cement in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province.

“The top priority is to continue to support Huaxin’s growth, particularly to support the direction Huaxin is taking to become an environmentally friendly business,” he said, adding there are a lot of opportunities in co-processing. It can pre-treat waste to use it as fuel to replace coal, gas or oil for the production of cement.

Riley said the cost of adding a co-processing facility to cement production and building a garbage pretreatment platform is about one third of the cost of constructing a waste incinerator.

He believes that using co-processing in the cement industry is a better solution than building incinerators to tackle China’s garbage problems, especially for the treatment of municipal waste.

China overtook the United States in garbage output in 2004. The amount of waste has been rising at a rate of 8 to 10 percent a year. The slow process in sorting and recycling garbage and the scarcity of available space for landfill sites have made incineration a more preferable option in China.

Environmentalists in China, however, are opposed to incineration. They argue that hazardous emissions, such as the toxic dioxin, are unavoidable if the burning temperature is less than 950 C. Dioxins have been known to damage people’s health. People who live near incinerators are especially vulnerable.

“The temperature used to produce cement can be as high as 1,700 C, which is much higher than the regulated temperature within an incinerator. Co-processing is a much safer way to treat waste,” Riley said.

Out of the nearly 40 cement plants Huaxin has, six have already become co-processing plants. “There will be around 10 to 12 co-processing plants by this time next year,” said Riley.

mengjing@chinadaily.com.cn

The Harbin-Dalian High-speed Railway under construction in Shenyang, capital of Liaoning province. China’s generous investment in infrastructure and housing nurtured the nation’s cement industry, which now has 3,800 producers and more than 2.9 billion tons of production capacity annually. Provided to China Daily

100-year-old company sees greener future for building materials industry in the nation

Nearly all the companies that our grandparents admired have disappeared because of the fast pace of change in today’s world.

“For a company that lives 100 years, it has to evolve through time,” said Ian Riley, China country head of Switzerland-based Holcim Group, one of the world’s largest cement producers and the archrival of France’s Lafarge SA.

Riley shared the simple secret at Holcim’s centennial celebration in Beijing recently. He is ready to develop the company’s China business into something more environmentally friendly. His plan is to turn garbage into an alternative fuel, replacing coal to produce cement.

“The vision we have in the future is that we can clean up the environment while at the same time produce reliable building materials,” said the 54-year-old British senior executive.

More than 100 years ago, Holcim opened its first plant in a small village in Switzerland called Holderbank, producing 90,000 tons of cement in its first year of operation.

Today, the company’s annual cement production capacity has reached 216 million tons with 149 plants plus 492 aggregates factories and 1,435 ready-mix concrete production centers in 80 countries.

“The longevity and the success of the company is not necessarily a secret. It is 100 years of very hard work and commitment and evolution to understand what the needs of today’s society may be,” said Riley.

For Riley, who has been involved with the China business since 1994 and moved to the country in 1998, China’s needs for the sustainable development of its cement industry are pretty clear.

The National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top economic planning agency, has already demanded a better environmental performance by the heavy industry that uses not only a massive amount of energy and resources for production but also emits a huge volume of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide.

Most importantly, the Chinese government sees the cement industry as a potentially large contributor to solving problems in municipal waste, which can be turned into alternative fuels. The technology can also help reduce CO2 emissions.

CO2 emissions from China’s cement industry account for about one-eighth of the country’s industrial output of carbon dioxide, according to a recent paper by Chris Nielsen, executive director of the China Project with Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Science.

According to the 12th Five-Year Development Plan of China’s Cement Industry (2011-15), the country, which currently has hardly any co-processing production lines that burn waste in the making of cement, will see around 10 percent of its cement production lines equipped with this technology by 2015.

“If you think about all those things that the Chinese government wants companies to do that require good technology and good management, there are a lot of excellent opportunities indeed for companies such as ours,” Riley said.

As early as the late 1990s, the company and nine other big cement makers co-founded the world’s first ever green initiative for the cement industry.

The Geneva-based Cement Sustainability Initiative, which develops guidelines for implementing greater efficiency measures through cooperation and sharing expertise among members, has since been regarded as the global pioneer for the sustainable development of the cement industry.

Apart from Holcim’s well-established advantages in green cement production, the company’s belief in the cement market potential in China is another driving force for Holcim’sevolution in the country.

China’s robust economic growth over the past several years has nurtured the world’s largest cement industry because of its generous investment in infrastructure and housing, the biggest users of the product.

Concrete, which is made from cement, aggregates and water, is the second-most consumed material in the world after water, according to the Cement Sustainability Initiative.

Cement demand in China has grown by double digits each year over the past decade, in line with the economy’s annual average growth rate of 10.7 percent, according to the China Cement Association.

China has the world’s largest cement industry with 3,800 cement producers and more than 2.9 billion tons of cement production capacity, which accounts for more than half of the world’s total.

However, a slowdown in China’s economy, which is predicted to grow at an average annual rate of 7.5 percent between 2011 and 2015, is likely to result in shrinking investment in housing and infrastructure, thus oversupply of cement is getting more and more serious.

“With the rebalancing of the economy, it is crystal clear that the golden era for the cement industry is gone. But the tough times will reshape it into a more sustainable and quality-focused industry in China,” said Lei Qianzhi, president of China Cement Association.

The number of cement producers in China has decreased to 3,800 over the past two to three years due to mergers and acquisitions. The top 10 cement makers in China have a 25 percent lock on production capacity in the nation, up from 15 percent in 2005. The top makers are expected to have a 35 percent market share by 2015, the 12th Five-Year Plan said.

Thanks to mergers and acquisitions, China National Building Materials Group Corp, with businesses in cement and other construction materials, was ranked 485th in the Fortune 500 list in 2011. It became the first Chinese building materials company to appear on the list. The company consolidated 154 small and medium-sized companies in eastern China over the past three years into its South Cement Co Ltd based in Shanghai. The conglomerate produced 138 million tons of cement last year.

CNBM Vice-President Cui Xingtai said in March that the group aims to increase its cement production capacity from 300 million tons a year to 500 million by 2015.

In the newly released list of the Global Fortune 500 in 2012, CNBM climbed to 365th place with $30.02 billion in revenue in 2011. Holcim was placed 474th with $23.38 billion and Lafarge was 480th with $22.97 billion.

“Through M&As, major players are able to control larger markets. By getting rid of outdated capacity and smartly reducing the actual production volume, cement can be sold at a better price. Price wars will not be as frequent,” said Sun Tieshi, vice-president of China Building Material Federation.

But not every company in this capital-intensive industry is able to purchase hundreds of cement factories to increase their competitiveness. Western players in the nation’s cement industry are focusing on sustainable development in the construction industry to get ahead.

Sang Kang, CEO of Lafarge Shui On Cement, a joint venture between Lafarge and Hong Kong-based Socam Development Ltd, told China Daily that the company will look to accelerate its development in sustainable construction in China. Faced with overcapacity, he said, companies that can upgrade their production models can better survive a downturn.

He views China as one of its key markets. The nation contributed 6 percent of Lafarge’s global revenue in 2011, up from 2.4 percent in 2006.

Lafarge opened its first overseas sustainable construction development laboratory in Chongqing last September to develop new and advanced construction materials, products and solutions for its customers in China.

The company is currently producing dust-free cement, and a product line of concretes that it claims provides more strength and durability.

China is one of Holcim’s top markets in the world, contributing more than 20 billion Swiss francs ($21.69 billion) in 2011. Senior executives from the company reckon cement demand in China has already reached its peak.

“The current market is flat. As the market continues to flatten, the nature of competition will change. The values of sustainability and environmental performance will play a much bigger role for a company’s further development,” said Ian Thackwray, Holcim’s president for Asia-Pacific and South Africa.

The company entered China in 1995 and formed a strategic partnership with Hubei-based Huaxin Cement Co Ltd, which is one of China’s oldest cement companies with a history of more than 100 years.

By investing in Huaxin, Holcim became the Chinese company’s largest shareholder with 39 percent of its total shares in 2008.

The partnership has helped Huaxin Cement to achieve a steady annual growth of 30 percent in revenue over the past eight years. It had a capacity of 60 million tons last year, ranking the company in the top 10 among Chinese cement enterprises.

Holcim is clearly confident in its Chinese partner and its strategy in China. Despite a rather sluggish market with an acute oversupply in cement production capacity, Holcimreinvested in Huaxin in December to raise its shares to 42 percent of the total.

“We’ve already seen the slowing down of the Chinese economy is affecting the construction business. So maintaining 30 percent growth in sales this year is difficult but may be achievable,” said Riley, who joined Holcim in 2006 and works as the vice-president of Huaxin Cement in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province.

“The top priority is to continue to support Huaxin’s growth, particularly to support the direction Huaxin is taking to become an environmentally friendly business,” he said, adding there are a lot of opportunities in co-processing. It can pre-treat waste to use it as fuel to replace coal, gas or oil for the production of cement.

Riley said the cost of adding a co-processing facility to cement production and building a garbage pretreatment platform is about one third of the cost of constructing a waste incinerator.

He believes that using co-processing in the cement industry is a better solution than building incinerators to tackle China’s garbage problems, especially for the treatment of municipal waste.

China overtook the United States in garbage output in 2004. The amount of waste has been rising at a rate of 8 to 10 percent a year. The slow process in sorting and recycling garbage and the scarcity of available space for landfill sites have made incineration a more preferable option in China.

Environmentalists in China, however, are opposed to incineration. They argue that hazardous emissions, such as the toxic dioxin, are unavoidable if the burning temperature is less than 950 C. Dioxins have been known to damage people’s health. People who live near incinerators are especially vulnerable.

“The temperature used to produce cement can be as high as 1,700 C, which is much higher than the regulated temperature within an incinerator. Co-processing is a much safer way to treat waste,” Riley said.

Out of the nearly 40 cement plants Huaxin has, six have already become co-processing plants. “There will be around 10 to 12 co-processing plants by this time next year,” said Riley.

mengjing@chinadaily.com.cn

Villagers to Battle Waste Plant

http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/battle-08212012163821.html

Description: http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/protest-04052011153707.html/china-incinerator-305.gif

Imaginechina

A Chinese worker looks into a garbage incinerator plant in Qionghai, south China’s Hainan province, Dec. 1, 2009.

Residents of an industrial town in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong are banding together in protest over plans to build a waste incinerator on their doorstep, local sources said on Tuesday.

More than 1,000 local people turned out for a town meeting late on Monday, amid rising anger and concerns over the health effects of pollution from the planned Humen plant, according to a local village committee member surnamed Zhou.

“There were about 1,000 people there, including bosses from nearby factories and local people,” Zhou said in an interview on Tuesday. “All of them were against the planned incinerator, which would have a huge impact on Xinwei [village],” he said.

Zhou said the township government had tried to keep the news under wraps following a campaign on the part of local residents, who wrote more than 10,000 complaint letters about the plans in recent months.

“Now it has come out that they are planning to start work at the location they originally planned for, following an environmental impact assessment,” he said.

The government wants to build the Humen Waste Disposal Plant at Dalingshan, just 650 meters from Xinwei and Dapaizhai villages, just 3.8 kilometers from the Henggang reservoir, which supplies Houjietownship with drinking water.

The hillside and lakeside location is already home to a number of smart apartment complexes, whose 50,000 residents thought they were buying into one of the last green oases in the Dongguan area, local sources said.

Threat to water?

A Henggang village resident surnamed Lai said she was concerned that pollution from the plant might poison the local supply of drinking water, on which around 100,000 people depend.

She said the high-level location of the plant and the prevailing wind direction would mean that the countryside downwind would be covered in toxic smoke from the incineration process.

“People here don’t believe that this won’t cause a problem,” Lai said. “They are afraid that all these toxic gases will be expelled and that they will start to get sick within the next five years.”

“That would be genuinely scary,” she said.

A resident of the Haiyi Haoting apartment complex surnamed Huo said the way the government had tried to railroad local people into accepting the project was unacceptable.

“I am definitely against this,” she said. “Our home is very near there, probably about five kilometers away.”

“There are residential districts in all four directions around the planned incineration plant, and residential areas right next to it, too.”

“A lot of people have already voiced their opposition to the incinerator and protested when it was first announced,” Huo said. “At the very least they should solicit opinions from local people.”

Growing activism

An official who answered the phone at the Dongguan municipal environmental protection department, which oversees Henggang township, said she hadn’t heard that the government was planning to proceed with the plant.

“I don’t know about that,” she said, but declined to comment further.

The preparatory committee for the plant announced plans for the 4.1 billion yuan (U.S.$645 million) incinerator last year, which is projected to burn 1,000 tons of rubbish daily.

Three decades of breakneck economic growth have left Guangdong with a seriously degraded environment, sparking a nascent environmental movement from the city’s new middle class.

Previous attempts to build similar plants elsewhere in the province have drawn widespread criticism over local government access to the huge potential profits linked to waste disposal projects.

In 2009, during a similar protest in Panyu, local residents said that incinerators could earn 140 yuan (U.S. $20) per ton in government subsidies for every ton of trash burned, which could amount to 480,000 yuan(U.S. $70,000) per day, or 173 million yuan (U.S. $25 million) each year.

Local residents fear the plants will endanger their health and the environment, while officials say Guangdong has to find some way to dispose of mountains of garbage.

Ordinary Chinese people are becoming increasingly active in support of environmental issues in recent years, putting pressure on governments to implement the country’s comprehensive environmental protection laws.

Activists say, however, that environmental officials lack the power to impose the legislation on powerful vested interests at the local level.

Last month, authorities in the southwestern province of Sichuan promised to permanently scrap a high-profile copper-processing plant after two days of violent protests from local residents.

Reported by Lin Jing for RFA’s Cantonese service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.

Copyright © 1998-2011 Radio Free Asia. All rights reserved.