Shanghai's Jinshan District will shut down construction "garbage hills" in two villages and build treatment plants to process and recycle the waste, the head of the district said yesterday.
The sites in Jiulong and Guangming villages in the southern district were set up temporarily to pile large amounts of garbage from the district's demolition campaign against illegal structures, said district director Hu Weiguo.
But villagers complained to the city's public service hotline about the unbearable smell in the scorching weather since other garbage was mixed into the piles.
They are also concerned the environment of the villages could be damaged after witnessing some rubbish being buried on site.
"The township governments will remove the garbage and close the piles within a week," Hu promised in a radio interview. "We cannot let the demolition campaign become a burden for the residents."
The district government has demolished over 5 million square meters of illegal buildings across its towns and villages this year — more than twice the target set early this year. Several temporary waste sites were set up to handle the overload.
In Jiulong Village of Shanyang Town, a major agricultural village in Jinshan, the garbage pile near Dengshu Road is two-story, or 40 meters, high.
Apart from construction waste, plastic bags, abandoned tires, foam boxes and other domestic garbage have been dumped there, according to a villager surnamed Zhang, adding the area was originally a farmland and was turned into a garbage field by the village authority a year ago.
"We feared the waste could contaminate the soil as well as a nearby river," he said.
The other pile — also now rising to two storys — was set up in a former peach garden in Guangming Village in Langxia Town, famous for its juicy and sweet flat peach.
To handle the waste from the two piles, the district will trial recycling the construction waste on site, Hu said. Stones and bricks will be crushed and processed to pave new roads in the villages. A company in Luxiang Town, for instance, has begun making bricks with the crushed construction waste. The new recycling project will be able to treat 1,200 tons daily. New garbage plants will handle 2,000 tons of garbage a day.
