Tunza Vol. 8.3 - UNEP

Green building
Cleaning up
sinopictures/viewchina/Still Pictures/Spec. Stock
In recent years, much has been made of electronic waste – computers, mobile
phones, and so on – being shipped to China so that their valuable metals and
components could be extracted. Joshua Goldstein, an associate professor at
the University of Southern California, spoke to TUNZA to put the problem in
perspective.
First of all, it’s a myth that all the West’s e-waste gets exported to China. There
was a big market about 10 years ago, but today, most of China’s e-waste is Chinese
– everything from computers and mobile phones to televisions and refrigerators.
Waste from the USA and Europe now goes to Vietnam, Pakistan, India, Egypt,
Ghana, Nigeria and so on. That said, there’s still a market for imported e-waste,
especially in south China.
China is building faster than any
country in the world and urbanizing
at an unprecedented rate: by 2030 its
total urban population is expected to
be more than a billion. To promote
more efficient resource use while
building factories, offices and homes,
it has created its own green building
standard, the Three Star system.
This has separate standards for commercial
and residential buildings,
covering land savings and outdoor
environments, indoor environmental
quality, operations and management,
and savings in energy, water and
materials. An extra category called
‘preference items’ evaluates harderto-implement
innovative strategies
such as renewable power and brownfield
redevelopment.
Recognizing the need for a sustainable
model of urban living, forwardthinking
developers have also been
trying to build prototype energyefficient
sustainable cities. There
are several eco-cities and villages
in process, such as Xiangji town in
Xinjiang, and Huangbaiyu in Liaoning.
The most high-profile of these projects,
Dongtan, has slowed, but the eco-city
E-waste is valuable for two reasons. First, components, especially from computers,
can be resold on the second-hand market. Particularly in developing countries,
people buy used CD drives, circuit boards and so on. This is good in terms of
reuse, and 80-85 per cent of the value of computer e-waste is generated this way.
The rest of the computer, which needs to be processed for its valuable metals,
only makes up 15 per cent of the value at most. Metals like gold that are hard to
mine are much more easily extracted from used stuff. The trouble is, it’s expensive
to extract them properly and safely, but highly profitable if done unsafely, such as
burning the plastic wires to get copper or dumping circuit boards into acid baths
and then disposing of the acid in a river.
The Chinese Government recognized the economic value of e-waste as well as its
health and environmental hazards, recently passing an electronics disposal law
to come into effect in 2011 and establishing centralized funding to subsidize safe
electronic recycling facilities.
The other part of the solution lies with producers, who must set new standards
for sustainable production, which could include simple things like using less toxic
materials, and making things more easily disassembled for recovery. There could,
for example, be a standard cell phone charger, rather than hundreds of different
kinds that get thrown out and need to be taken apart. The best news is that the
industry has already started making moves in this direction.
in Tianjin, a green urban community
for 350,000 people being built in
northeast China in partnership with
the Government of Singapore, looks
on track to be completed by 2015. It
will use wind and geothermal power
and have more green space than
any city in China; more than half its
water will be harvested rainwater and
recycled grey water; more than 60 per
cent of its waste will be recycled; and
a light railway will discourage car use.
a total of 420 kilometres of track
by 2012. By 2015, China’s cities will
have more urban rail than anywhere
else in the world, with more than
2,000 kilometres of line in 11 cities.
China’s car production and ownership
are also burgeoning. In 2009,
China sold more than 13.5 million
vehicles, an increase of 43 per cent
over the previous year, becoming
the world’s biggest car market. To
cope with this and to minimize impact,
its automobile fuel-efficiency
stan dards are 40 per cent higher than
those in the USA. Because China
has to import most of its petroleum,
it’s looking for alternatives, particularly
using non-food stocks
such as waste oil, vegetable oil and
jatropha. It’s already the world’s
third-largest pro ducer of ethanol,
which it pro duces using marginal
land. Plans were recently announced
for a plant that can convert agricultural
waste into ethanol, and
is slated to produce more than 11
million litres of bioethanol a year.
It is hoped that agricultural waste
might supply around a tenth of the
country’s fuel in the next decade.
While this is just a taste of the
multitude of green initiatives
under way in China, it’s important
to remember that they all have
state support. As nations continue
negotiating how to come to terms
with global warming, it looks as
though China may emerge as a
leader in how to jumpstart a bright
green economy.
More from less: Resources and the environment
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