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: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday November 21 2019, @11:14PM (4 children)
That's one massive dump. I don't think air freshener or matches are going to cut it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @11:33PM
What does SF have to do with this?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22 2019, @04:50AM
One of my favorite deadpan deliveries ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnun8y7r8_U [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday November 22 2019, @04:23PM
I dunno, enough fire would likely turn it all to ash, but you might invite the wrath of the Environmentalists.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday November 24 2019, @10:57AM
Doesn't Xi'an have a large number of pre-dug underground pits? They could fill those up with waste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @11:30PM (2 children)
I don't think that means what you think it does, Mr Chinaman.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @11:38PM
Need to offset the carbon from burning trash
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22 2019, @12:06AM
Shoreline Amphitheater next to the Googleplex was built on a landfill and didn't have proper methane mediation.
The first years after opening there would be spontaneous fires during concerts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @11:37PM
When the local dump was getting full they dowsed it with kerosene and lit a match. It was the size of an Olympic swimming pool and served a few hundred families.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Appalbarry on Thursday November 21 2019, @11:42PM (4 children)
Maybe, just maybe, stories like this explain why China and other countries have begun refusing to accept garbage from North America. Heaven forbid we should have to dispose of our own trash!
(Score: 3, Informative) by legont on Friday November 22 2019, @01:36AM (1 child)
It's more like they have ended accepting western trash.
It also means that separating your waste and other recycling propaganda has no meaning any more. All the shit is going right back together.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22 2019, @09:07AM
Correct. It all goes to the same place, it's a waste of fucking time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22 2019, @08:58AM
Might be temporary. Because if China can set up enough incinerators that are about as good as Sweden's then it's actually a good thing for China if OTHER countries to pay China to send "fuel" to China...
Currently China has to dig out coal or buy fuel. And the coal they burn isn't that clean either. They're supposedly doing nuclear power too but that's still not as good as someone paying you to give you fuel.
(Score: 2) by Fluffeh on Tuesday November 26 2019, @09:17PM
I dunno man, considering how much manufactured garbage we import from China each and every year, I think it would be perfectly fair to return some of it.
Whoops. I meant manufactured product.
Seriously though, I fully support a tariff on "single use" or "junk product" that goes directly to dealing with some of this problem at the destination country.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday November 22 2019, @12:24AM (6 children)
If memory serves (hey, the Chargers bolted to LA, Brady Bunch trivia overwrote football trivia a couple years back) a football field is 100x50 yards, plus end zones. Don't remember hearing they're an inch tall, or a foot, or, hell, 200 feet tall.
At least I know how big a football field is, better than 20 Rhode Islands. But cubic yards or acre feet or somesuch would be better.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Friday November 22 2019, @12:54AM (1 child)
That might be more informative. Who knows?
(Score: 2) by PocketSizeSUn on Monday November 25 2019, @08:04AM
As a point of reference:
700,000 m2 = 70 hec = 173 acres
US largest landfill is 700 acres (2,800,000m2) and similarly 150m deep
https://www.google.com/search?q=us+largest+sanitary+landfill&oq=US+largest+sanitary+land&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j33l2.7464j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 [google.com]
So as landfills go 70hec is on the smaller side.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22 2019, @02:03AM (2 children)
#21 There is negative profit in making items last a long time
#154 There is no profit to make things easier to recycle or have alternative end of life uses
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Friday November 22 2019, @11:03AM (1 child)
Gee. I would have thought both rules would have been closer to the top of the list...at least in the Top Ten.
Flaws, rules...one man's meat...
(Score: 2, Funny) by nitehawk214 on Friday November 22 2019, @03:24PM
Flaw #935: The list of flaws is not sorted by importance.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday November 22 2019, @03:14AM
At least let's hope they use the fire to generate power.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday November 22 2019, @10:59AM (1 child)
Why don't the Dutch and Bangladeshis accept the world's rubbish? They are concerned about rising sea levels and need to build up their lands. They get paid to accept the material so that's a lot more cost-effective than paying others to acquire fill. Plus, as a Soylentil once pointed out, today's landfills are tomorrow's gold mines; it would be a smart long-term move.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22 2019, @06:25PM
There are a few reasons they put parks on old landfills instead of housing developments. Besides toxicity issues, the main one is that stuff compacts as it breaks down and most rigid structures don't do well with unevenly moving soil.
Besides if you're trying to build up to avoid sea level, most of the trash must be going in below the water line, which wouldn't seem to help anything - toxic leaching into ground-water, or stability of the dump.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday November 22 2019, @03:11PM
10 Collect Trash
20 Build Islands in the South Pacific, especially land bridges to Taiwan.
30 Profit!
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