Sitting pretty on a mountain of trash

Former Chinese banker sees great potential in waste-to-energy sector

With nearly 1.4 billion people, China produces a lot of waste.

About 250 million tonnes of it. And that figure is expected to double in the next decade.

Chen Xiaoping, however, feels he’s sitting pretty on a mountain of trash. Chen is CEO of China Everbright International, one of the country’s largest waste management firms—which does half of its business in the green technology sector by converting waste to energy.

“Our staff members like working in this industry, and have fallen in love” with trash, Chen tells CNBC’s Managing Asia. “I studied finance and used to deal with currencies. Now I’m in environmental protection and have to deal with garbage. (But) since I’ve entered the business, I’ve fallen in love with it.”

The waste-to-energy process uses incineration, gasification, thermal deploymerization, and other methods to produce electricity, heat, or a combustible fuel commodity—ethanol, methane, methanol or synthetic fuels, for example. More importantly, thermal waste-to-energy technologies reduce greenhouse gas emissions by less than half, compared to landfilling the equivalent amount of biodegradable waste.

It’s been reported that China’s landfill sites consist of trash mountains so high that they can be dangerous.

The Chinese national government has recognized environmental protection as a priority, and plans on building about 300 waste-to-energy plants by 2019—including the world’s largest, which will handle a third of all the waste produced by the city of Shenzhen’s 11 million people.

“The waste challenge is all about education . . . and experiencing the scale of the challenge is part of that education process,” Chris Hardie, whose Danish firm is designing the Shenzhen plant, tells Fast Company.

“Think of it like smoking in the 1950s and 1960s. Everyone smoked. It was only until a civilization became educated on how much it was polluting our bodies did we dramatically stop,” adds Hardie. “Waste is similar. If you don’t realize the damage it’s doing, why stop creating waste?”

China Everbright International burns solid waste, converting it into energy—and with operations mainly on the Pacific Coast, Chen’s company is eyeing an expansion inland.

“We will move from cities to rural areas by shifting our focus from the treatment of solid waste and urban domestic waste to the treatment of waste in rural areas, including agricultural waste and straw,” he says.

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