China's 'Waste to Power' Plants Burn More Coal than Trash

A recycling collection center in Hefei, China. Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife

China produces more than a quarter of the world?s trash, a burden that the government is attempting to solve by burning some of it for energy. But the incinerators often mix waste with an even greater measure of coal, adding more global-warming gases to the atmosphere and toxic chemicals to the air of China?s cities, a recent report says.

China?s metropolises are growing far faster than their waste-disposal systems can handle, according to a March report [pdf] by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Incentives and pollution controls intended to create clean energy are doing exactly the opposite.

China is producing 250 million tons of household waste annually, and the pile grows at a rate of eight to 10 percent per year. Most is landfilled, but by 2030 the country wants to burn 30 percent of its municipal solid waste.

Energy from waste could help fill China?s burgeoning demand for power, which is expected to grow 77 percent by 2020. But with the industry in a disorderly state, the report said, ?that sounds to good to be true.?

Some of China?s larger cities, like Guangzhou and Beijing, are served by sophisticated incinerators made by Covanta or Veolia that capture toxic emissions, said Elizabeth Balkan, a research consultant at Economist Group. But second-tier cities can?t afford such systems, and sometimes even the best machines have pollution controls turned off because they?re too expensive or troublesome to maintain.

Furthermore, Balkan said, waste managers in China don?t dry their solid waste as much as their Western counterparts do, meaning that trash is wet and needs to be mingled with coal in order to burn. Officially the plants are supposed to include no more than a 20 percent blend of coal, but in reality it is often 50 percent coal and sometimes as high as 70 percent.

?Such plants operate practically as small coal-fired power stations ? exactly the kind of facility that Beijing wants to eliminate on public health grounds,? the report said.

Meanwhile, emissions controls on waste-to-power plants are more lax than on coal-fired power plants, allowed to produce four times the nitrous oxide and five times the sulfur dioxide. Both gases warm the atmosphere and harm human health.

Energy from waste is a lucrative business in China because a plant?s electrical output is considered renewable energy and is rewarded with a feed-in tariff of about four cents per kilowatt hour. But practices that pay for expensive pollution controls in North America and Europe are mostly absent.

Such clean technologies are often funded with ?tipping fees,? which are paid by a city to the agency that handles its waste. In the U.S. tipping fees run between $70 and $100 per ton of waste and in Europe it is up to $150, Balkan said. But such fees in China average only $8 a ton, and sometimes aren?t paid at all.

The waste resulting from incineration, known as fly ash, is only 10 percent the volume of the original trash. But is highly toxic, and few controls exist in China to prevent it from being landfilled and polluting the air and water.

One bright light is that incinerators are getting a bad reputation in China and generating more resistance among people who don?t want the smell or toxic burden they bring to a neighborhood. The report cites news reports that at least six new incineration plants have been delayed recently because of opposition.

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