WE are not only contributing to the expanding and encroaching landfills, but also doing it in ever-more creative ways.

During my weekend train trip to Hangzhou, each passenger was given a bottle of water containing purest H20 from glaciers in the Tibetan Plateau.

I marveled at the stupendous energy consumed in shipping the water from glaciers to the bullet train - to say nothing of the devastating environmental impacts - and genuinely hope the claim was a lie.

A marketing professor once observed to me that Evian water exemplifies perfectly what pure marketing can achieve: A substance that is same everywhere in the world is branded as one of the most aspirational luxuries today.

To be seen casually grabbing a bottle of Evian can be classy, if your interests in the bottle do not go beyond the magic dustbin where the bottles ultimately land.

A couple of days ago I was offered a bag of chestnuts - chestnuts deprived of their original shells and reclad in small plastic bags - another instance of human ingenuity.

Ten years ago on a train, when I first saw a lady peel an orange and then consign the rind to a red plastic bag, I was mesmerized by her delicacy.

For more than 10 years now, in my limited experience, we have already packaged sunflower seeds, preserved fruits, biscuits, chopsticks, towels, in additional to all industrial products - what next?

We have grown addicted to packaged items, because our perceptions of civilization and prosperity are based on these packaging materials, or as Dr Tian Song claims, based on trash.

The degree of a human being's civilization can be reliably measured by the amount of trash he/she produces.

One of the most condescending attitudes a civilized being regularly assumes over his less fortunate cousins is his higher sanitation standards.

Early last century Jay Denby said in his "Letters of a Shanghai Griffin" that "I must inform you that their (the farmers') time is spent mainly in the vocation of agriculture, the chief productions therefrom being smells, graves, and rice, in the order named."

He went on to say that "the farmer who succeeds in making his land smell more abominably than his neighbor's is looked upon with respect, admiration, and envy by the surrounding population."

This gentleman was so polite that he took great pains to avoid specifying the source of this smell, but for the sake of clarity I must add that the substance in question was human excrement and urine that since time immemorial have been used to fertilize the Chinese farm fields.

Most of the farmers now have switched to chemical fertilizers.

As late as in the early 1980s in my native village in north Jiangsu there were still rustic youths specialized in picking up ordure on the roads, with human feces particularly prized.

One of my cousins entrusted with this job used to make surreptitious raids on public latrines, which was considered public property.

Mr Denby might never know that this is the only truly green way of disposing of human excrement in which it is fully recycled and assimilated by crops.

If Mr Denby was asked what had become of his excrement, he might have replied, well, it is disposed of by the flush toilet.

Mr Denby does not know that it then circulates in a labyrinth of underground sewage, is discharged into the rivers and lakes, some of which later find their way back to our potable water system.

In the rare cases where it gets fully recycled, the process would require an amount of energy that clearly suggests the cure can be worse than the disease.

When I attended a water conference in Bali, Indonesia, last year one expert talked glibly of his charitable effort in helping some backward Asians get access to running water and modern toilets.

One Western listener observed that these people have been living like this in contentment for thousands of years, and wondered why they cannot be left alone.

A heightened sense of sanitation and hygiene is based on your ability to inject rubbish into the ecosystem that is considered hostile, alien, or at least something apart, something that is to be conquered, outwitted, or privatized.

By contrast, in Chinese philosophy ideal human existence is founded on human beings' oneness with the awe-inspiring Heaven (nature).

Encroaching landfill

Consumption power - or garbage-generating power - is now a measure of prosperity.

Statistics from last year show that 125 million tons of waste were created in 655 Chinese cities in 2007, representing an annual increase of 8 to 10 percent, apocalyptically comparable to the GDP growth.

As 40 percent of the garbage is simply buried in the suburban or rural areas without any recycling, ever-encroaching landfills are closing in on two thirds of these 655 cities, which are themselves expanding fast.

"In Beijing, as existing landfills are all operating beyond capacity, in four or five years there will be no place to bury the garbage," said Chen Yong, director of Beijing Municipal Administration Commission, in a recent interview with South Weekend.

These swelling landfills are drawing protests from concerned locals.

The picture is grim for Shanghainese too.

In 2007, each Shanghai resident created an average of 1.04 kg of garbage per day, comparable to the 1.1 kg for Japanese that year.

Shanghai's facilities can safely bury, incinerate, or recycle only about 8,500 of its total 20,000 tons of garbage created on an average day - the rest is sent to the over 200 makeshift garbage dumps scattered in the suburb.

Our growth is fueled by consumption, and we are more concerned about any letup in this growth than the expanding landfills.

According to one definition, sustainable development refers to development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

As a matter of fact, we are gratifying our imagined needs today by compromising our real needs tomorrow.