China’s industrialization has put heavy pressure on the environment. For decades, China was the fastest-growing country in the world, powered by heavy industry that transformed it into the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. The ecological degradation at home caused public outcry, but the desire to catch up with the West overrode that concern. The damage was so bad that over 1.6 million people in China are estimated to have died in 2013 from air pollution alone. According to a Greenpeace report, water pollution has also reached an alarming level, with more than half the water in major rivers in eight Chinese provinces deemed “unsuitable for human contact” as of 2015.

Today, China is attempting to reposition itself as a green power. After much criticism, the government publicly declared war against pollution, announcing its intention to create an “ecological civilization.” Traditionally, China’s pollution problem was caused by heavy industry. Now that China is ready to rebalance its economy toward a consumption-led model, it hopes to reduce the environmental burden. However, with cities as large as midsize European countries and a population eager to consume, China faces a new environmental dilemma: what to do with the municipal waste generated by consumerism.

As recently as the 2000s, the majority of Chinese still lived in the countryside; in 1990, just 26 percent of them officially lived in the cities. But decades of remarkable urbanization have, according to the China statistical yearbook of 2016, left 56.1 percent of Chinese living in cities. But with cities comes trash—as of 2004, China was already the world’s largest municipal solid waste generator, according to the World Bank.

In China, garbage is commonly handled via landfills (60.16 percent) or incineration (29.84 percent), and sometimes untreated discharge (8.21 percent), with the proportion of each shifting every year. Because landfills can no longer keep up with the demands of growing cities, incineration is on the rise. Some argue that incineration is more economically efficient, as it reduces the volume of waste after burning by up to 90 percent, while reducing the weight by 70 percent, thus saving a lot of land resources. Coupled with energy recovered through incineration, waste-to-energy power plants have spread throughout China’s new cities. Although the Chinese government has tried to promote such facilities as a clean way to get rid of waste, civil society has often opposed the construction of new incinerators, for fear that they will lead to even more pollution. Protests have broken out across China, in Hubei, Hunan, Guangdong, Hainan and elsewhere, against plans to build new incinerators.

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This article has been published by Andreea Leonte, Fellow for China Studies at RISAP, in Foreign Policy. You can read the full article on the Foreign Policy website.