A visit to the garbage incinerator, and the future

There’s always a prize in the Sanfeng Energy crane game.

Three giant claws — the biggest a kid could ever want to play with — descend into what is likely the world’s biggest garbage can, a concrete Stygian pit hectares in size, and ascend clutching a colossal treasure of prize Chongqing garbage. They then carry it over to a chute that leads to an inferno helping to produce 30MW of power in a facility in the heavily wooded backblocks of the Mountain City. Household waste that would otherwise have gone to landfill helps power the Chongqing grid.

Chongqing, the vast megalopolis of south-western China, is among other things a key Belt and Road port — a logistics centre we visit features a global map centred on Chongqing, with routes around the world both very real, like the rail line that starts there and ends in Germany, and decidedly imaginary, like the putative trade routes extending on the map from China across the Asian region. With a skyline taken straight from a science fiction film and vast infrastructure to move 20-plus million people around a city positioned between three mountains, everything in Chongqing is big. Big population. Big roadworks. Big garbage. We know because we get to see several hundred tonnes of it being tossed into the furnace at Sanfeng.

To illustrate the process, our robotic guide (albeit not as robotic as the actual robot that delivers my meds when I get COVID-19 in Shanghai) ushers us into a theatre to watch what is probably one of the more bizarre industrial videos ever made — a film following the journey, or should that be ordeal, of a little boy’s teddy bear. Said plush toy is callously abandoned by its growing owner in favour of more sophisticated playthings, but is saved from meaningless mouldering in landfill by Sanfeng, which extracts and incinerates the creature. Far from being unhappy with this fiery fate, the bear welcomes it (“I’m feeling warm and toasty!” it cries, plunging toward the flames) as enabling it to then guide us through Sanfeng’s high-tech process of scrubbing the dioxins and heavy metals from the resulting fly ash.

With the neighbours mainly heavily forested mountains, there are few NIMBY problems — not that there’s much of that in China, one gathers, but the entire plant is sealed and its processes isolated, so there’s not even a whiff of garbage. The tour of the huge facility — you run out of similes for “big” real fast in Chongqing — concludes with the power plant control room, which turns out to be literally the only thing we’re not allowed to photograph in China. Among the images being fed back to the huge display board are views from within the inferno where the teddy met its end, along with the rubbish of 20-odd million Chongqing citizens (not counting another 10 million or so around abouts).

Sanfeng, after a period with US investment, is a publicly traded company mainly owned by Chongqing region state-owned enterprises. This is unsurprising, given that the primary source of income for waste-to-energy plants the world over is actually tip fees, not power revenue, and 20 million people produce a lot of rubbish. The overall process reduces the requisite landfill by 75% to 80%, and much of the remainder is used in road construction — which in this region still appears a boom industry judging by the vast pillars intended to hold up new freeways that dot the landscape.

The visit provides a one-two punch for Australian mindsets with the trip the next day to automobile manufacturer Changan, which is headquartered in Chongqing. While the streets of Chinese cities now don’t look too different to Western cities in terms of the numbers of American, Japanese and European vehicles, you can’t miss the heavy presence of Chinese-manufactured electric and hybrid vehicles. Changan makes an extensive range of them, from luxury SUVs — we’re talking Western luxury levels, if you’re inclined to be dismissive — through to a tiny electric two-seater, with only the very top-end, limited edition vehicles with the lie-back-and-have-a-massage-while-the-car-parks-itself seats costing more than A$50,000. And all partnered with Huawei for its IT and navigation systems, although your chances of the government not knowing where you are at any time, given the proliferation of cameras on major roads in China, is minimal anyway.

A later tour of one of Changan’s factories shows why modern heavy manufacturing is a mug’s game for developed countries. The cars are assembled, complete with tyres and the battery pack, on a line worked entirely by Japanese-built robots, with a few human handlers keeping an eye on things. Once transferred to the fitout line, robots provide the materials while human workers insert the interiors, ready the engines and add the finishing touches before they reach the end, someone hops in and drives it around the corner into the loading bay.

The Europeans are terrified of these cheap Chinese electric vehicles, and are investigating whether to impose punitive tariffs on the basis that China is subsidising companies like Changan. But coming from a country where there is still limited charging infrastructure, politicians demonise EVs, and vehicle emission standards are a generation behind anywhere else, the robots assembling the vehicles and sticking the batteries in them feels like a glimpse of the future as much as the incinerated teddy or the Blade Runner skyline.

Bernard Keane visited China as a guest of the All-China Journalists Association.