China's capital city Beijing may face "garbage crisis" in four years, if no more waste disposal facilities to be built in time, the city's municipal administration warned on Tuesday.

The volume of trash in the capital city is growing by 8 percent annually. 90 percent of garbage is buried in landfills, officials with the city's commission supervising cityscape told Chinanews.com.

Beijing, with a population of about 20 million, currently generates 18,000 tons of trash every day and the designed capacity of its garbage disposal plants is 11,000 tons each, which are already overloaded. "If new garbage disposal facilities can't be built in time, Beijing will have to face a big challenge brought by the soaring volume of waste in four years. Incineration is a significant solution to solve the problem for Beijing, a city short of land resources," said the commission's officials.

However, incineration is seldom used in the city due to the objection from the public, most of whom feared the pollution the incineration may generate, according to the commission. Wang Xiaohong, a professor from Guangzhou University's College of Environment Science and Engineering said that it is not a technical problem any more to incinerate all the garbage. The new solution for waste disposal has proved efficient in recent years, but deficient management and publicity led to the lack of the public's support, he added.

Wang Weiping, vice general engineer from Beijing's cityscape watchdog, admitted that the key point for popularizing incineration is to improve the supervision over the implementation of the measures designed to contain the pollution of the refuse destructor plants.

Wang Weiping suggested to battle the emerging crisis, more efforts be made to reassure the public of the safety and efficiency of incineration.

(CRIENGLISH.com December 30, 2009)