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China's mega-dump already full - 25 years early
China's largest dump is already full - 25 years ahead of schedule.
The Jiangcungou landfill in Shaanxi Province, which is the size of around 100 football fields, was designed to take 2,500 tonnes of rubbish per day.
But instead it received 10,000 tonnes of waste per day - the most of any landfill site in China.
[...] The Jiangcungou landfill in Xi'an city was built in 1994 and was designed to last until 2044.
The landfill serves over 8 million citizens. It spans an area of almost 700,000 square metres, with a depth of 150 metres and a storage capacity of more than 34 million cubic metres.
Until recently, Xi'an was one of the few cities in China that solely relied on landfill to dispose of household waste - leading to capacity being reached early.
Earlier this month, a new incineration plant was opened, and at least four more are expected to open by 2020. Together, they are expected to be able to process 12,750 tonnes of rubbish per day.
The move is part of a national plan to reduce the number of landfills, and instead use other waste disposal methods like incineration.
The landfill site in Xi'an will eventually become an "ecological park".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22 2019, @01:13AM (3 children)
Yank units - "football" fields, yards, acres, feet.
Join the metric system, ffs.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday November 22 2019, @10:55AM (1 child)
We did, in 1975 I believe it was. It didn't take, except in the military. Social inertia is a funny thing.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by quacking duck on Friday November 22 2019, @03:06PM
The USA is a strange mix of backwards and forwards. It's often at the forefront of new consumer technology (due to amount of disposable income or credit, and need for new toys), but institutional norms (chip+PIN credit cards, tap-to-pay, dollar coins instead of bills, and of course metric) can be literally years or even decades behind other countries.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22 2019, @04:59PM
The metric system is entirely unsuitable in relating useful information like this. It is great if you want to do some calculations on it, but regarding relating the size/weight/etc. for a story like this? Less than useless.
Most non-metric units exist because they are useful and easy to relate to. Everyone has an intuitive feel for what a foot is, and the difference between someone who is 5 feet from someone who is 6 feet tall. I'm 6 feet tall, and it is very easy for me to know how big you are if you told me you are 6 ft 2 inches tall. It is not helpful to know that I am 1.83 m while you are 1.88 m.
People naturally can understand and relate to numbers that are about a dozen or so -ish. Large numbers are hard to visualize. This is why useful units are invented in the first place. When you start dealing with numbers that start getting too big to relate to, you come up with a new unit that is comparable to what you are talking about. In this case, everyone has an intuitive feel for how big a football field is, and for the intent of this story it doesn't matter if you are talking about an American football field or a European football field because for the intent of this story, they are basically the same size. If it turned out that they were talking about something that would be the size of thousands of football fields, than you wouldn't describe it in terms of that, but something like the size of a state or small country or something like that.
I always roll my eyes at people who have such a hard on for the metric system and tout their obvious cleverness and intellectual superiority by advocating it for everything. But they fail to recognize that moving around decimal places is nice, but extremely useless if we want to discuss everyday things. Sure, if I wanted to calculate how much kerosene I needed to purchase to fill that landfill so that I can set fire to it, it is metric all the way. However, if my kerosene vendor of choice sells it by the tanker car, then guess what, my units are going to be tanker cars, not liters.