Need for Nanjing tree replacements questioned

Residents of Nanjing, capital of East China's Jiangsu province, are questioning whether the city management department wasted funds on replacing old camphor trees along the road linking the urban area to the airport.

Yangtze Evening News reported that a resident had seen workers digging up more than 100 camphor trees along the road and then replacing them with other camphor trees.

"I don't not know why they dug up the trees, which were very much alive, and then planted the same kind of tree there again. How much did the project cost?" the resident asked.

The workers said they removed trees that were less than 13 cm in diameter and planted trees of more than 17 cm in diameter, all of them camphor trees, the newspaper reported.

The project was authorized by the Housing and Urban-Rural Development Bureau of the city's Yuhuatai district, and Cheng Daowei, director of the bureau, told the newspaper the old trees were small and had to be replaced by bigger ones.

The project cost 700,000 yuan to 800,000 yuan ($110,293 to $126,050), Yuhuatai Landscaping Co, which did the work, told the newspaper.

An unnamed manager at the company said the trees that were removed had been in barren soil for 10 years and could not grow properly. New, fertile soil was added before the new trees were planted.

But the workers on the project said it would have cost less to simply put fertile soil around the old trees, according to the newspaper.

A local construction expert, who declined to give his name, told the newspaper the cost of moving a tree was three times more than planting a tree, and company contracted for the project could earn more money selling the dug-up trees to another landscaping project.

To some extent, such interlinking interests were often the reason for tree removals, the expert said.