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Ma Xingrui (front, third right), the municipal party secretary of Shenzhen, and other officials visit the site of the landslide in the southern city on December 21. Photo: Reuters

Shenzhen landslide: How China creates more waste than its dump sites can handle

Cities should have regulations in place to manage how construction materials are handled but lax oversight allows illegal operations to flourish

The collapsed dump in Shenzhen has reinvigorated calls to improve handling of construction waste, a persistent concern for policymakers in Shenzhen and other cities.

Some cities, such as Foshan in Guangdong and Changsha in Hunan province, have stepped up inspections of local dump sites to prevent similar tragedy.

Li Ying, an associate professor at Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, said each city had its own system to handle construction waste. In theory, it should have regulations for each step in the process – from collecting it at the point of origin to recycling or dumping it. But in practice, trucks usually simply carry the waste late at night to points far out of town.

An urban management official in Jinan told Shandong news portal Iqilu.com that about a third of construction waste was sent to legal dump sites for proper treatment.

Another third was buried after the project was finished and the rest was often piled up close by because there was no appropriate site to accept the waste.

Only nine out of Jinan’s 44 waste dump sites with 30 million square metres of capacity, had enough room to accept materials for the upcoming year.

The cost of running a proper dump was high, with more than two employees needed to manage the site around the clock and maintain safety standards. Given those conditions, illegal ones prospered.

“Usually there is just one pit for trucks to unload. Safety is unlikely to be an issue,” the official said.

Even though the government recommends waste to be recycled, the two companies in Jinan that specialise in recycling receive enough waste to operate.

“We all know the waste comes from urban development,” an industry insider was quoted by Iqilu.com as saying.

“Illegal dumping occurs when more waste is produced than dump sites are built. It is like more cars trying to park in limited parking space.

“What happened in Shenzhen is an extreme case of fast development of the city that ignores effective logistics such as handling construction waste,” the insider said.

The Zhejiang branch of the China Democratic National Construction Association has filed a proposal to build more waste dump sites because what’s been generated by urban development has been piling around the province’s big cities, creating a safety hazard.

In Shenzhen, a Baoan district member of the Political Consultative Conference, Chen Kexin, has been pushing for more dump sites since 2008, saying the pace of the urbanisation drive has outpaced the capacity to handle the construction waste.

The Longhua new district said in a statement earlier this year that there were not enough construction waste dumps to cope with local construction projects. Illegal dumping occurred as a result and valleys and pits by roadsides and construction sites had become common choices for unauthorised handling.

The demand for construction waste dumps was so great that all sorts of means were used to get rid of it. In April, state-owned farmland comprising tens of thousands of square metres in Longhua district was turned into a waste dump site by the leasing company. Each truck paid 320 yuan (HK$383) to deposit one load and hundreds of vehicles arrived at night.

The waste piled up so high that it spilled from the sides, causing concerns during the rainy season.

Two years ago, 28 trucks from Shenzhen transporting construction waste were confiscated by traffic police in Dongguan. Drivers said the waste came from subway line construction or residential property development.

Dongguan police found that trucks, always numbering in the dozens, frequently transported waste after midnight and a small mountain would appear out of nowhere overnight. The only penalty at their disposal was for overloading.

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