China’s Waste Paradox: Too Little to Burn, Too Much to Dump
China’s waste-to-energy industry has arrived at a strange contradiction. In some cities, incineration plants are underfed (chi bu bao) with not enough garbage to burn — operators compete for trash and dig up decades-old landfills for fuel. In others, particularly rural and less-developed regions, waste still piles up (dui bu xia), openly dumped or burned. A People’s Daily report published Oct. 11 examines this dual dilemma and asks whether it undermines the very rationale for waste sorting.
The stakes are considerable. China operates the world’s largest incineration network, processing capacity greater than Europe, the United States, and Japan combined. The report, authored by Kou Jiangze, frames the problem not as a national garbage shortage but as a structural and regional mismatch — one that has nonetheless reshaped the industry’s economics.
The Numbers Behind the Paradox
The scale of China’s incineration build-out is striking. According to Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (MOHURD) data cited by Xinhua, as of end-2024 the country had 1,137 municipal household-waste incineration plants in operation, processing an average of 1.158 million tonnes per day, with an average load rate of 88.7%.
But a closer look at the MOHURD’s 2024 Urban-Rural Construction Statistical Yearbook reveals strain beneath the headline figure. As a Securities Times deep-dive reported in March, 1,129 plants in cities and counties incinerated 268 million tonnes that year at an overall capacity utilization of roughly 63.22% — below the 70% lower limit set by national standard GB/T 18750-2022, indicating industry-wide overcapacity.
The divergence is geographic, tracking roughly the Hu Huanyong Line, China’s population geography divide. Provinces in the northwest — Xinjiang, Sichuan, Ningxia, and Qinghai — exceed 80% utilization, while Hainan, Jiangxi, Guangdong, Hebei, Zhejiang, and Tianjin fall below 60%. Even within a single province the gap can be stark: Guangdong overall sits at 54.41%, yet Shenzhen’s five plants ran at about 103% utilization in 2024, with three of the five overloaded.
How the Boom Became a Glut
The roots of the mismatch lie in a construction boom. Professor Dang Yan of Beijing Forestry University told Securities Times that not enough waste to burn is not simply due to technical progress — incineration technology matured long ago. The main cause, he said, was the nationwide plant-building boom that created oversupply.
The early-2000s introduction of the build-operate-transfer model, combined with national subsidies, drew firms into the sector, launching a golden period from 2012 to 2019. A nationwide benchmark tariff of 0.65 yuan per kilowatt-hour within 280 kWh provided stable revenue expectations. Selected-bid project counts peaked at 75 in 2021 but fell to 20 in 2024, according to Guosen Securities — a sign of a market moving into consolidation.
Because plant revenue is tied to the volume of waste processed, the glut triggered competition for garbage. “Now there are even more incineration plants than there is garbage,” Yang Bo, a worker at an incineration plant in southern China, told Securities Times.
A Nationwide Landfill Dig
One response has been to excavate the past. Xinhua reports that more than 80% of Chinese cities have completed remediation of old garbage mountains. Shenzhen’s Yulong landfill — activated in 1983, closed in 1997, and sealed in 2005 — held 2.5515 million cubic meters of waste piled 110 meters high. Remediation began in 2024, with up to 6,000 tonnes dug per day, set to release about 300,000 square meters of land for a digital industry cluster.
Guangzhou’s Xingfeng landfill takes a different approach, blending excavated aged waste with fresh waste to balance calorific value, with freed capacity held as a strategic reserve. Beijing has stopped all 22 of its sanitary landfills from accepting new waste.
Dang Yan noted that aged landfill waste has already biodegraded and drained, leaving a low-moisture residue particularly suitable for incineration. But he cautioned it is a stopgap: structural overcapacity ultimately must be resolved through market consolidation until supply and demand balance.
Is Sorting Still Necessary?
A central question is whether waste sorting (la ji fen lei) still makes sense if incinerators lack fuel. Officials and experts say yes — but the method is changing.
Dang Yan cited a practical reason: kitchen waste accounts for more than 60% of waste by weight and has moisture content up to 80%, so burning it directly harms incinerator efficiency and lifespan. Zhang Li, director of MOHURD’s Environment Sanitation Engineering Technology Research Center, told Xinhua that recyclables make up roughly 20% to 30% of household waste, and a sound recovery system turns garbage into raw materials.
People’s Daily framed the principle bluntly: If one relaxes reduction or abandons sorting merely to satisfy incineration capacity, that is putting the cart before the horse.
The approach is shifting from the complex four-category model toward simpler systems emphasizing recyclables. MOHURD Minister Ni Hong told a national conference on urban household-waste classification in May that sorting is a long-term, ongoing task, stressing adapting measures to local conditions and urging an accelerated recyclable system, according to a MOHURD statement.
From Power Plant to Resource Factory
The industry is transforming its business model. Rather than relying purely on waste-to-power subsidies — which are gradually retreating — plants are diversifying into urban mining. Options include heat and steam co-generation sold to nearby industry, co-processing of sludge and general industrial solid waste at blending ratios of 20% to 30%, and carbon-reduction revenue through the CCER mechanism.
Subsidy retreat is a trend. “The era of lying down to make money is over; the industry must shift from large-scale construction to refined operation,” Xu Haiyun, chief engineer of the China Urban Construction Research Institute, told Xinhua.
Companies are also looking outward — going down to counties and going overseas, particularly to Southeast Asia. In March 2026, Weiming Environmental won projects in Bali and Bogor, Indonesia, each with investment up to US$175 million.
What to Watch
Under the State Council’s Comprehensive Action Plan for Solid Waste Management, China aims by 2030 to bring historical solid-waste stockpiles under effective control and push bulk solid-waste annual comprehensive utilization to 4.5 billion tonnes. Four priorities are set: control capacity and adjust layout; advance sorting and reduction; drive high-value transformation; and close systemic gaps.
The paradox of too little to burn and too much to pile up is, in this telling, less a failure than a signpost. It marks the moment China’s waste sector moves from building at scale to running with precision — and from treating garbage as a burden to treating it as a resource.