A Life of Science: A Series by New Scientists
Waste-to-energy incineration technology has become a primary solution for handling municipal solid waste in urban China. What are the true environmental and societal costs?
I have always known what pollution smells like. Each morning on my way to elementary school in Dongguan, a city in southern China, I passed by a canal bordered by evergreen curtain figs. The canal remains a vivid childhood memory not for its beauty or tranquility, but for its distinctive smell. The air was thick with a sulfurous, rotten-egg smell mingled with the fermented odor of decomposing garbage, a stench likely emanating from the stagnant, low-oxygen water itself. This canal was originally constructed to alleviate flooding in southern China caused by the torrential rains of the monsoon season. However, with the rapid growth of the clothing industry and other manufacturing facilities essential to local economic development, it had gradually become a convenient dumping ground for polluted water. Most pedestrians just walked by indifferently, with only one or two occasionally remarking on the darkness of the water or its unpleasant smell, particularly during the hot summer months when the high temperatures intensified the stench.
“There’s not much of a smell here, right?” The tour guide showed us around the impressive waste incinerator, frequently checking in with me as we walked toward the tour tower. This waste-to-energy incinerator is located in one of the circular economy industrial parks in Guangzhou, the largest city in southern China, and is just a two-hour drive from the river I so vividly remember from my childhood. Looking out from the tour tower, I could see a billboard displaying a political slogan on environmental policy, set against a patch of green grass: “Green mountains and clear waters are as valuable as mountains of gold and silver.”
Photo by Huiqi Zhang.
I had come to the facility in the summer of 2024 as part of my Ph.D. in East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson. My dissertation project investigates waste politics in urban China, focusing on methods like recycling and energy recovery. At the incineration facility, I conducted pilot research on environmental politics regarding waste treatment in Guangdong Province, China, focusing particularly on how waste-to-energy incineration technology has become a primary solution for handling municipal solid waste within the current environmental policies of Chinese society. Unlike the foul-smelling river from my childhood memory, my encounter with waste in this massive facility was devoid of smell and sensation, much like visiting a science museum. With ventilation systems and ducts filtering out contaminated runoff and gases, the typically unpleasant experience of encountering waste or pollution in our daily life was “sanitized,” as the physical presence of waste became merely a transitional phase before being transformed into electricity and heat for households. This technology presents an optimistic vision of reorienting and reutilizing waste, now the only resource that continues to grow in the Anthropocene.
Waste-to-energy incinerators burn what is categorized as “other waste” or “mixed garbage” in municipal solid waste, including plastic bags, fabrics, napkins, and so on. This type of waste does not fit into standard categories such as organic waste, recyclables, or hazardous materials. Instead, it consists of miscellaneous items that could not be processed by a single method and therefore end up in the incinerator. The guided tour brought to life the process of waste-to-energy incineration technology that I had read about. Behind the glass window, I watched as numerous trucks loaded with garbage drove into the vast garage, where a row of gates on both sides of the wall opened for them to unload their cargo.
The next stage captured my attention: a gigantic metal claw in the storage pit, anything but fragile, plunged into heaps of debris, seizing fistfuls of trash to feed the furnaces. There was something mesmerizing, almost violent, in its mechanical rhythm. I found myself fixated on its sheer size and force, on how it rendered the chaotic mess below seemingly manageable under the power of technology. On the right side were the gates where the trucks dumped their waste. On the left, the waste had already piled up, having fermented for several days, waiting for combustion.
Photo by Huiqi Zhang.
Similar to traditional landfilling, waste-to-energy incineration follows the logic of displacement and containment when it comes to waste management in urban areas. Segregated from spaces of living and relegated to geographic and social margins, unwanted waste must be managed through various practices to conform to modern hygiene standards. Out of sight, out of mind. This has long been our approach to waste. Consider the hidden drainpipes that carry away sewage and industrial wastewater, or the municipal solid waste hauled to landfills by trucks. The systems are designed to remove waste from our immediate view—and with it, our concern. However, with the overwhelming increase in production and the accumulation of non-degradable materials, traditional landfilling can no longer meet our demands. In response, sustainable methods such as waste-to-energy incineration and recycling are emerging as ways science and technology can transform waste into reusable forms, which can then be sold for use by companies or households before they degrade or lose value. However, although both energy recovery and recycling are promoted as key components of sustainable waste management policies, their associated environmental costs are often overlooked.
Technologies such as waste-to-energy incineration are often celebrated as ultimate solutions to pollution. Yet, hidden impacts like the carbon emissions generated from transporting waste to recycling centers call for a more critical reexamination. As we drove towards the incinerator at the start of the day, I saw numerous garbage trucks traveling along winding mountain roads. The road seemed to exist solely for them, with our car being the only vehicle not carrying garbage for reuse. It underscored the significant amount of greenhouse gases emitted during waste transportation. This is not to mention the environmental footprint of building and maintaining infrastructure and amenities, such as well-paved roads, to facilitate recycling. Suddenly, it felt like the scale of the system revealed itself to me, not just as a process, but as an entire infrastructure built around the constant circulation of waste. While sustainability is made highly visible, the physical system that supports it—roads, fuels, and emissions—remains unseen.
As a result of this oversight, current waste policies fall short of addressing the full complexity of the ongoing dilemma. Instead, they often introduce new technological risks and exacerbate the uneven distribution of environmental harm, disproportionately affecting marginalized communities, both locally and globally. Toxic waste, such as electronic waste and plastic from developed countries, is often exported to the Global South under the guise of safe and clean recycling. This kind of disposal exposes local people working in the waste recycling industry to severe health and environmental hazards. The idea that everything we discard is either recycled or converted into energy can offer a false sense of relief, allowing us to believe that technology has taken care of the problem for us—and that our environmental responsibility ends at the bin.
Waste-to-energy incinerators face an additional challenge: the incomplete combustion of materials. Often damp due to the high humidity in Guangzhou, incomplete combustion can result in the release of toxic gases such as dioxins, sulfur dioxide, and carbon monoxide. These issues are major concerns for residents, as they refuse to bear the brunt of technological risks and pollution. To ease such skepticism, the tour guide first led me to a giant glass box reminiscent of a NASA mission control room before delving into the details of the incineration process. “This is the room where we monitor our incinerator in real time, so there’s no need to worry about safety at all,” he told me. I felt a bit unsettled by the hint of anthropocentric omnipotence in that statement, as if we humans always had everything under control. As any viewer of sci-fi or apocalypse films knows, nothing good happens after someone says something like that.
Beneath the virtual blue sky ceiling, a grid of monitoring screens displayed various data and live camera feeds capturing different stages of the incineration process. At the top of the screen, a display indicated that this facility had operated safely for 2,012 days without an accident. This record not only reflects strict safety protocols but also hints at the sheer scale and continuity of waste management required to sustain such operations. Running for about 8,000 hours each year, which averages to roughly 22 hours per day, this incinerator generates 1.2 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, with approximately one-sixth of that energy used to power the facility itself. The total output is enough to fully charge more than 18 million electric vehicles.
Photo by Huiqi Zhang.
Before we dive into celebrating how effectively technology reutilizes the unwanted remnants of human society to generate energy and value, it is crucial to examine the afterlives of waste. This scrutiny offers an opportunity to reframe the issue—not only by assessing its environmental impact but also by exploring the social, economic, and ethical implications of waste management. In fact, the waste problem has always been a prominent, if not inevitable, component in our conceptualization of environmentalism, largely due to extensive media coverage. Yet, this visual prevalence carries a bias as it excessively emphasizes post-consumer waste while neglecting industrial waste. Many people may recognize the widely circulated image of a deformed sea turtle trapped in six-pack rings, often used in campaigns against littering. However, fewer realize that industrial waste, not municipal solid waste, constitutes the majority of the garbage produced by humans. Research suggests that for every ton of municipal solid waste produced by consumers, there are approximately 30 tons of industrial waste created by large corporations. However, stakeholders continue to frame the waste issue as something that can be mitigated through recycling and green consumerism. As multiple scholars in discard studies point out, industries externalize the responsibility and unpaid labor of sorting and recycling waste, shifting the burden onto individual households and consumers through excessive packaging and disposable, low-quality goods.
In China, municipal solid waste is clearly marked and categorized by different colors —blue for recyclables, green for organic waste, red for hazardous materials, and black/grey for non-recyclable, non-compostable waste—so that only the correct materials are loaded into incinerators. But the unruly and unexpected presence of waste permeates the planet and beyond and escapes the neat confines of color-coded bins. One example is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Composed of microplastics smaller than 5 millimeters in size and displaying a kaleidoscopic spectrum of colors, this pervasive yet nearly invisible garbage patch threatens marine life and disrupts ocean ecosystems. I think of the giant metal claw from the incinerator and imagine it descending on the garbage patch and scooping it up. But then I remember that, contrary to the common misconception that it is a solid “trash island,” this trash vortex is too dispersed to form a cohesive mass. In reality, waste is not so easy to tame. Techno-optimistic solutions to the planetary waste crisis, such as waste-to-energy incinerators, still seem far from offering an answer.
My trip to the waste-to-energy incinerator has led me to realize that addressing the waste crisis is not merely a technical challenge at the end of consumption, but also a socio-structural issue that requires examining industrial production itself. Indeed, the polluted canal from my childhood memory is a result of direct industrial wastewater discharge rather than household waste. Through participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and other ethnographic methods, I plan to explore how waste is managed throughout the recycling and remanufacturing of used paper, with a particular focus on how recycling is framed within contemporary environmental discourse.
Waste-to-energy incinerators promise Chinese citizens a safe and efficient way of handling post-consumer waste by showcasing their clean and complex infrastructure. But exploring the hidden workings of the recycling industry, particularly how used paper products are processed on-site through collection, sorting, pulping, and cleaning, offers a deeper perspective on waste management as a planetary crisis. If we could shift our focus from consumption to production, we could prevent the unnecessary creation of waste, such as excessive packaging and manufacturing byproducts, right at the source.
The sheer magnitude of the incinerator, reflected in its annual capacity to process 2.26 million tons of municipal solid waste, underscores how waste management has evolved into a thriving industry in its own right. While visitors are welcome to tour waste-to-energy incinerators, production sites like paper-recycling factories and mills remain far less accessible, yet they share no less responsibility in the production and processing of waste. Directly engaging with the spaces where waste is managed and processed is crucial for deepening our understanding of waste politics and the environmental narratives that shape contemporary recycling practices, especially when those environments evoke visceral, unexpected responses.
As I walked past the maze of pipes, tubes, and buzzing turbine generators inside the incineration facility, I couldn’t help but feel a strange sense of displacement—waste was on the inside, being processed, yet I was surrounded by the machinery built to contain it. For a moment, I felt as though I was becoming part of the system itself, like a piece of waste moving through a vast machine.
Huiqi Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in the East Asian Studies Department at the University of Arizona. With a background in literary studies and sociocultural anthropology, her research explores waste politics and the environmental narratives surrounding them in contemporary China. She is currently working on a project focused on the paper recycling industry.
Header photo—cowpeas, kale, and Swiss chard (commonly called spinach in Kenya and Tanzania) growing beneath a solar array structure in an agrivoltaic system—by Talitha Neesham-McTiernan.
