Of this plant’s throughput of processed refuse, 40 percent will become organic fertilizer for tree planting, 30 percent will degrade to become water or other innocuous substances, and the remaining 30 percent will be buried in landfills. “We can save 14,000 square meters of landfill every year. Of course, if everything that came here was kitchen waste, with a higher proportion of degradable matter, we wouldn’t need any landfill at all.” Xu takes out a test report, “Our organic fertilizers are tested every month by Beijing Environmental Health Monitoring Station. They are very popular with the farmers around here.”

At the Liangxiang Kitchen Waste Processing Station in Fangshan District, each ton of kitchen refuse can produce two kilograms of organic fertilizer. Another such station in Chongwen District has a treatment capacity of 30 tons a day, and two further medium-sized stations are to be built in Chaoyang and Haidian districts. Soon, a complete kitchen waste processing system will be in place – large composting plants like Nangong and Asuwei being the main elements, supported by medium-sized stations, and supplemented by smaller community-level plants.

“In China, our only option is the triple system of sorting, recycling and reutilizing waste as a resource,” says Zhao Zhangyuan, research fellow of the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences. “Sorting alone is not sufficient. Waste must reenter the system as a resource for new production and products.”