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Consumers splurge on while landfills fester
By Wan Lixin |
October 14, 2010, Thursday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
INCREASINGLY, our level of civilization appears to be measured by how much we buy, especially how much nonessential stuff.
Doctor Tian Song from Beijing Normal University asked sometime ago, "Why we can easily drink a bottle of water said to be bottled from a deep valley far away?"
The simple answer is that we can afford to.
Or because water can be "mined" and shipped to its many destinations at very low costs - low if one can simply drop the bottle into the trash can and forget it.
But those who find the "afford to" answer unsatisfying, usually begin to notice Beijing's (and other cities') troops of garbage workers who collect trash from all over the city and then consign it to suburban landfills.
Apparently Beijing can afford to use its soil for landfills.
According to a report in Wenhui Daily on September 28, if all the garbage trucks in Beijing were to be parked in a line, they would easily measure the length of Beijing's monumental third ring road.
The problem is that Beijing, like nearly every other Chinese city (or any city on earth), is running out of landfills.
Every day Beijing residents produce a total of 18,000 tons of trash, while existing facilities can only handle 12,000 tons of it.
To put it plainly, the 14 dumps around Beijing are all running at overcapacity, and will be filled in a few years.
Just as some rich countries ship their waste to the poorer, third world countries, the common practice in China is for the more "civilized" cities to send their trash to as yet undeveloped rural areas.
Still, it's much easier to fill up landfills, than to find new ones.
There are frequent reports of hostilities between affected villagers who refuse to live with refuse.
In Chongqing in August 2004, villagers blocked a road to prevent garbage from being shipped to a landfill, turning half of a highway into a repository for 4,000 tons of trash.
Other means of waste disposal, such as incineration, are also strongly resisted by those living near proposed facilities.
Last October in Wujiang, Jiangsu Province, a protest against an incinerator led to the suspension of a project designed to generate electricity from waste.
Last November, a similar protest in Panyu, Guangdong Province, stalled the construction of a similar project.
In Shanghai's former Nanhui District, a lot of local residents complained of being victimized by a foul smell emanating from a dump at Laogang.
"There were bad smells the year round, but when it blows southeast in the summer, the odor is simply overwhelming. Some workers cycling from the garbage-handling dock were followed by a swarm of flies, so dense that you can catch them by a handful with one grasp," one grocery owner reportedly said.
Some outraged villa dwellers in Beijing turn rebellious when they happened to learn last July that an incineration facility was being considered near their neighborhood in Xiaotangshan in Changping District.
"These villa dwellers are mostly well educated, with respectable professions, but they lost their composure when confronted with something that had a direct bearing on their interests," the afore-mentioned Wenhui Daily report observed.
Consequence
What the report failed to see is the fact that these villa dwellers are mostly big-spenders, and they feel angry when confronted with a situation for which they should be held partially responsible: excessive consumption.
In my view, consumerism has spread like prairie fire exactly because consumers need not be confronted with the direct consequences of their excesses.
The consequences only affect a troop of rubbish-handling workers who happen to be migrants, whose contribution to consumption is relatively small.
As Tian Song continued to observe in his depiction of the fate of an empty bottle, if one is not allowed to dump an empty bottle into a garbage can, but must carry it about one's person or store it at home, would he or she be as ready to consume a bottle of water?
Tian observed that modernization rests on two premises: supply of resources and energy from non-modern, or less modern regions, and the discharge of waste back to those areas.
Consumption
Modernization is more like a food chain whereby upstream countries and regions can not only extract resources from regions downstream, but also discharge the waste thereto.
The prerequisite is to first identify the downstreams.
Apparently not all have downstreams, but that fact does little to discourage some from spreading the gospel of global prosperity.
Modern economics is based on earth as an infinite supplier of resources and space.
When we know this to be untrue, we take refuge in new technology. For instance, turning waste into energy.
This caviling about incineration, then about sorting the rubbish, then about our cooking style, distracts us from the real problem: rampant consumerism.
In a discussion in 2007 during the 10th Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), some delegates proposed to legislate against excessive consumption to promote "social harmony." That call was never made again.
Some analysts point out that in China excessive consumption is chiefly practiced by officials and the newly rich.
The new rich's appetite for luxury goods periodically stuns even sophisticated Westerners.
This kind of consumption is even openly embraced as part of national policy, in the feverish chase after GDP and efforts to stimulate consumption.
That trivializes the trash debate, making policy makers flirt with seeming solutions, but ignore the real problem - blatant consumerism.
Doctor Tian Song from Beijing Normal University asked sometime ago, "Why we can easily drink a bottle of water said to be bottled from a deep valley far away?"
The simple answer is that we can afford to.
Or because water can be "mined" and shipped to its many destinations at very low costs - low if one can simply drop the bottle into the trash can and forget it.
But those who find the "afford to" answer unsatisfying, usually begin to notice Beijing's (and other cities') troops of garbage workers who collect trash from all over the city and then consign it to suburban landfills.
Apparently Beijing can afford to use its soil for landfills.
According to a report in Wenhui Daily on September 28, if all the garbage trucks in Beijing were to be parked in a line, they would easily measure the length of Beijing's monumental third ring road.
The problem is that Beijing, like nearly every other Chinese city (or any city on earth), is running out of landfills.
Every day Beijing residents produce a total of 18,000 tons of trash, while existing facilities can only handle 12,000 tons of it.
To put it plainly, the 14 dumps around Beijing are all running at overcapacity, and will be filled in a few years.
Just as some rich countries ship their waste to the poorer, third world countries, the common practice in China is for the more "civilized" cities to send their trash to as yet undeveloped rural areas.
Still, it's much easier to fill up landfills, than to find new ones.
There are frequent reports of hostilities between affected villagers who refuse to live with refuse.
In Chongqing in August 2004, villagers blocked a road to prevent garbage from being shipped to a landfill, turning half of a highway into a repository for 4,000 tons of trash.
Other means of waste disposal, such as incineration, are also strongly resisted by those living near proposed facilities.
Last October in Wujiang, Jiangsu Province, a protest against an incinerator led to the suspension of a project designed to generate electricity from waste.
Last November, a similar protest in Panyu, Guangdong Province, stalled the construction of a similar project.
In Shanghai's former Nanhui District, a lot of local residents complained of being victimized by a foul smell emanating from a dump at Laogang.
"There were bad smells the year round, but when it blows southeast in the summer, the odor is simply overwhelming. Some workers cycling from the garbage-handling dock were followed by a swarm of flies, so dense that you can catch them by a handful with one grasp," one grocery owner reportedly said.
Some outraged villa dwellers in Beijing turn rebellious when they happened to learn last July that an incineration facility was being considered near their neighborhood in Xiaotangshan in Changping District.
"These villa dwellers are mostly well educated, with respectable professions, but they lost their composure when confronted with something that had a direct bearing on their interests," the afore-mentioned Wenhui Daily report observed.
Consequence
What the report failed to see is the fact that these villa dwellers are mostly big-spenders, and they feel angry when confronted with a situation for which they should be held partially responsible: excessive consumption.
In my view, consumerism has spread like prairie fire exactly because consumers need not be confronted with the direct consequences of their excesses.
The consequences only affect a troop of rubbish-handling workers who happen to be migrants, whose contribution to consumption is relatively small.
As Tian Song continued to observe in his depiction of the fate of an empty bottle, if one is not allowed to dump an empty bottle into a garbage can, but must carry it about one's person or store it at home, would he or she be as ready to consume a bottle of water?
Tian observed that modernization rests on two premises: supply of resources and energy from non-modern, or less modern regions, and the discharge of waste back to those areas.
Consumption
Modernization is more like a food chain whereby upstream countries and regions can not only extract resources from regions downstream, but also discharge the waste thereto.
The prerequisite is to first identify the downstreams.
Apparently not all have downstreams, but that fact does little to discourage some from spreading the gospel of global prosperity.
Modern economics is based on earth as an infinite supplier of resources and space.
When we know this to be untrue, we take refuge in new technology. For instance, turning waste into energy.
This caviling about incineration, then about sorting the rubbish, then about our cooking style, distracts us from the real problem: rampant consumerism.
In a discussion in 2007 during the 10th Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), some delegates proposed to legislate against excessive consumption to promote "social harmony." That call was never made again.
Some analysts point out that in China excessive consumption is chiefly practiced by officials and the newly rich.
The new rich's appetite for luxury goods periodically stuns even sophisticated Westerners.
This kind of consumption is even openly embraced as part of national policy, in the feverish chase after GDP and efforts to stimulate consumption.
That trivializes the trash debate, making policy makers flirt with seeming solutions, but ignore the real problem - blatant consumerism.
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