“Stones are blasted off mountains, cement is kilned under high temperatures, and just how much greenhouse gas is generated in such processes? So reuse of existing resources serves multiple purposes,” Wang Wei’s tone is urgent. He hopes that the government will take measures to promote the transformation of waste materials and give environmental friendliness some teeth at the industry level. In particular, an increasing amount of construction garbage generated by urban reconstruction and natural disasters is becoming the latest headache for cities.

Last April, following the earthquake in Qinghai’s Yushu in western China, preliminary estimates showed that 6.73 million tons of construction garbage were generated in the epicenter of Jiegu Town. That has a dimension of 4.04 million cubic meters, so the local government promptly started a recycling project: stone and brick rubble was further crushed and used to level out the ground, pad foundations for roads and single-storied houses, and fill in patches of sunken earth; the remains of reinforced concrete-brick buildings were used for road foundations; wooden boards, planks and pillars were used to build bungalows and temporary shelters; and anything and everything made of steel found in the ruins was collected and recycled. By early June, 2 million cubic meters of construction waste had been sorted and repurposed.

As a matter of fact, recycling urban solid waste has been a preoccupation of Shanghai’s for 30 years or more. Their lengthy research has paid off. The million tons of cinder that the city generates every year is being transformed into construction material. In the past cinder was unwanted and unusable, but now the value of the resource is summed up by Wang Wei as its “105 percent reutilization rate.” This seeming impossibility refers to the fact that cinder buried underground in the past is being dug out to feed new building material needs, as no more of it can be found above ground.

Shanghai will also reuse the million tons of desulfurized gypsum that it gets stuck with every year. Desulfurized gypsum is the star project of a special department of the Shanghai Research Institute of Building Science that is dedicated to the study of solid waste. A focus of the research is to guarantee that building materials made of these previously used materials have as long and safe a life span – 50 years – as regular building materials.

Give It Away – Tasty and Tasteful Waste

The Taipei Pavilion sets the tone for the reuse of kitchen waste and abandoned furniture.

Chinese cuisine produces a heavy amount of kitchen waste, the sheer sogginess of which makes it tough to burn. In 2004 Taipei started promoting kitchen waste reutilization and the local government jumped on the bandwagon to provide free containers for separating edible or biodegradable waste from other domestic garbage. Some residential areas even bought freezers to keep it fresh enough to be used as pig feed.