World's Largest Trash Incinerator to Hit Full Production Next Month, Downwind of Beijing

In what comes as just peachy news to read on the second consecutive day of AQI 300+ air quality in the capital, China Daily reports that the world's largest garbage incinerator is set to be turned on full blast next month, downwind of the center of town.

The incinerator, built by the Shougang Group (whose massive steel factory, also downwind from Beijing, was fully decommissioned in recent years due to pollution concerns), has been operating under test conditions for about a year and will go full blast next month, China Daily states. The incinerator is located in Lujiashan (marked by the number 1 in the map below), northwest of the city.

Obviously desperate to get into an even filthier business, Shougang will now be burning 3,000 tons of trash daily, or about 17 percent of the total solid waste produced in Beijing every day. To put that in perspective, that's roughly equivalent to the weight of 16 blue whales, the heaviest animal that ever existed, every day.

Prior to burning, the trash will be dumped into a massive 30-meter-deep receptacle (a former limestone quarry, to be exact) to ferment for a week. Plant operators claim that the smell will be minimal due to what China Daily calls a "custom-built air-blast system [that] keeps the atmospheric pressure in the pond lower than that outside ... thus keeping the smell of rotting garbage locked within the pond and sparing the neighborhood of the stink."

The good news is that the incinerator will double as an energy provider, as the incineration of all that la ji will produce 420 million kilowatt hours of power annually, the equivalent of 140,000 tons of coal. That's a lotta juice for us citizens to turn our air purifiers on full-blast and recharge our iPhones to take pictures of Beijing's filthy air for sharing on social media.

Even better news is that the plant is equipped with state-of-the-art environmental controls (which we sincerely hope they keep switched on "high"). If operated correctly, we could be looking at less air pollution than the 140,000 tons of coal burning it will displace, and at least an alleviation of the pesky landfill problem Beijing faces (aka no places to bury all that trash we produce).

This is the first major incinerator to be built in Beijing, despite long-made promises to have built nine before 2015. Pesky NIMBY opposition has slowed these plans, and in fact China Daily states that only one has made it online so far. In the mean time, Beijingers continue to produce trash, to the tune of seven million tons last year (or more than 41,000 blue whales, for those of you measuring at home) and an expected eight million tons next year.

Images: China Daily, Wikipedia, Bing Maps