Chapter 14 Chapter 13 Why Our Trash Crisis Is So Bad
The situation is urgent and an unprecedented test that cannot be avoided.
There are more than 400 garbage dumps outside Beijing's Fifth Ring Road. These yellow dots are garbage dumps.
Mysterious prophecy, why aim at 2020?
If there are no new policies with special effects, the Chinese economy will probably hit a wall at that time.
Tracing back to the source, what is the crux of the dislocation economy?
It is not a garbage problem, but the root cause of garbage production, which is a major flaw in the economic development model.
Many recent media reports pointed out that our country is preparing to further increase energy conservation and emission reduction.Many real estate developers said that they want to build some kind of green environment-friendly, energy-saving and emission-reducing community.There is also the furniture industry saying that they want to create low-carbon furniture.These people are just nonsense.In fact, how can we Chinese have any qualifications to engage in energy conservation and emission reduction? That is a matter for Europe and the United States.I'm not saying that this issue is not important, but we Chinese have more important things to do. Energy conservation and emission reduction is a game played by Europe and the United States.Do you know what is the real urgent problem we need to solve in China now?
Do you know how terrible our living environment is now?After a year of investigation, Wang Jiuliang, a citizen of Beijing, released all the photos he took of the garbage dump in Beijing, which is really shocking.These garbage dumps are basically distributed between the Fifth Ring Road and the Sixth Ring Road, densely packed, and there are more than 400 of them above the medium scale.In fact, these garbage dumps are considered good, at least they are under planning and can be managed in a unified manner.What is even more frightening is that a lot of garbage is burned and piled up in the open air at will.Take the Liyuan area of Tongzhou District, Beijing as an example. There is an open-air garbage dump here, and many motorized tricycles come to take out the garbage every day. Basically, this garbage dump will be incinerated every two or three days. When it is burned, Thick smoke can be seen in a radius of several kilometers, and there is also a pungent and unusually unpleasant smell. What is particularly worrying is that this situation is not unique to Tongzhou, but is very common throughout the country. 3 of the garbage is disposed of in this simple way.Do you know how much garbage our China produces every year?Nearly 160 million tons!I have a data here. In our city, the per capita annual garbage output is 440 kg. 600 cities across the country have piled up or landfilled up to 8 billion tons of various types of garbage. Two-thirds of our cities have been surrounded by garbage. Garbage The accumulative stockpile encroached on 500 million square meters of land!
After the World Climate Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009, the term "low carbon" was quickly accepted by the domestic public. From reducing energy consumption in family life to office, transportation, travel and other aspects, the topic of "low carbon" has become ubiquitous , "Low-carbon life" has also become the most fashionable attitude towards life. On January 17, 2010, in Guangzhou Metro Line 2, 18 netizens took off their pants and walked into the subway car.This scene is a continuation of the "Take the subway without pants" campaign in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States. The original intention of "no pants" is to promote the reduction of the use of modern industrial products, thereby reducing carbon dioxide emissions, that is, to advocate the so-called "low-carbon life".According to the concept of "low-carbon life", a pair of polyester trousers needs to be washed 92 times with 50°C water and a washing machine within two years of its service life, plus drying and ironing. The energy consumed is equivalent to the emission of 47 kg of carbon dioxide. That's why it makes sense to take off your pants.However, the "pants off show" in Guangzhou Metro has encountered various doubts from the moment it happened. Is taking European and American games over to join the "low-carbon life"?Can the environmental problems we encounter today be solved by simply using "low-carbon life"?
Do you know what the concept of 500 million square meters is? In 2008, the sales area of commercial housing across the country happened to be 500 million square meters.In other words, the area of land occupied by garbage across the country is about the same as the area of the houses we built in 2008.Do you still feel indifferent?Do you think you can still find a place to bury your garbage?Then let me show you a report published by Chinanews.com on December 30, 2009. The relevant person in charge of the Beijing Municipal City Appearance Management Committee said that currently 90% of Beijing’s waste is landfilled, accounting for about 500 mu of land, and it is still increasing at a rate of 8%.If we fail to build new facilities in time, in 4 years, Beijing will face a severe situation where the garbage cannot be disposed of. Not only Beijing, but many of our large and medium-sized cities have filled or are about to fill their landfills.Shanghai and Guangzhou generate 18,000 tons of garbage every day, and Shenzhen has exceeded 12,000 tons every day.Even in Nanjing, where there is only 4,500 tons of household waste per day, the three existing landfills are about to be saturated.In other words, almost all of our cities are now facing a crisis of garbage siege. Do you think that's enough?What is more terrible than the garbage siege is the garbage pollution! On April 2, 2010, garbage polluted the water source of the Minjiang River and caused large-scale water cutoffs in downtown Chengdu, and this was only a temporary water cutoff.There is also Guiyu in Guangdong. Because it is the world's largest dismantling and dismantling center for electronic waste, its air, soil and groundwater have been seriously polluted. Not only the air is dirty, but the groundwater is also polluted by heavy metals. drank.Not only that, many of our natural rivers have lost their drinking function, such as the Three Gorges. During the rainy season every year, the river surface will be full of garbage after every heavy rain. Sometimes it is even necessary to open the gates to release water to remove part of the garbage to avoid damage to the turbines.There is also Qiandao Lake, which was surrounded by garbage due to continuous precipitation. The local government used more than 100 motor sailboats to clean it up. It took more than two months to clean up the garbage. What is hidden behind this?is a serious e-waste problem.According to the investigation and calculation of experts such as Liang Haoguang from the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, since 2003, Beijing has entered the peak period of scrapping electronic and electrical products.Improper disposal of electronic waste is extremely harmful, especially electronic products such as TVs, computers, mobile phones, and audio systems. These electronic products contain a large amount of toxic and harmful substances, such as lead, cadmium, mercury, chromium, plastics, and flame retardants.According to statistics, the cathode ray tube of each television or computer monitor contains an average of 4 to 8 pounds of lead.Once the lead enters the soil, it will seriously pollute the water source, which will not only harm plants and microorganisms, but also human beings. Lead will have a great impact on children's brain development. Moreover, we are not countries like Japan that pay great attention to environmental protection. We do not have the habit of sorting garbage. We often mix e-waste with domestic garbage and burn it together, resulting in fly ash containing a lot of heavy metal particles, and then the wind blows these Heavy metal particles are carried tens of kilometers, or even hundreds of kilometers away, causing pollution in a larger area.Although incineration facilities have been set up in more than 30 cities in China, few of them have hazardous waste landfills. Considering the design, for example, the hazardous waste landfill in Shanghai can be filled within three years if the incineration fly ash is accepted.There are also more serious problems. Some garbage that should be burned is "turned into treasure" after some simple treatment, such as medical waste. Do you know how harmful it is?According to the statistics of the United Nations, about 5.2 million people die from pollution caused by medical waste every year in the world, of which 4 million are children.What's behind this?Another black industrial chain.These large amounts of medical waste with germs, after simple processing in some workshops, become raw materials for plastic products, flow to the market in large quantities, and then are processed into food bags, plastic packaging bags, plastic buckets, tableware, and thermos pots that we use every day. Enclosures, water pipes, etc. How can there be so much rubbish?It's very simple, everyone, take a look at our own diet and daily life.In the past, when we bought soy sauce, we prepared glass bottles by ourselves, and when we bought vegetables, we prepared cloth bags or bamboo baskets by ourselves. Therefore, the domestic waste generated is basically degradable and can be simply buried. If there is a heavy rain, it will be washed away. In the river, it is regarded as adding bait to the fish, and it does not contain any toxic substances anyway.But now, the situation is not so optimistic.Let's look at the photos of Qiandao Lake and the Three Gorges Garbage Surrounding Lake. What are these garbage?Basically plastic!Because these garbage contains a lot of harmful substances - chlorine, it is very easy to produce dioxins if they are incinerated. When these plastic wastes are in the air, as long as you walk near them, dioxins may infect you.Do you know how serious this infection is?Let me read it to you: Dioxin can cause endocrine disorders in the body, causing infertility and miscarriage in female animals. In male animals, it can reduce the production of sperm cells and feminize male animals.Moreover, it is a fat-soluble substance, which is very easy to accumulate in the body. Once it enters the body, it is estimated that it will not be excreted in this life.So now every time the government proposes to build a waste incineration plant, everyone will unanimously oppose it, so it cannot be incinerated, so how to deal with these wastes?It can only be landfilled, but if it is buried, it will occupy more land and cause a wider range of pollution. Why?Or because our garbage is mixed with plastics, which are difficult to degrade materials. Therefore, in order to really solve this problem, we still need to completely change our way of life and cultivate our awareness of environmental protection, such as developing the habit of sorting garbage, and using as little plastic as possible.Speaking of plastic as a chemical material, I think it is necessary to talk about its source.The basis of all this is the long-chain theory of a German chemist Hermann Staudinger in 1920. In 1930, the German chemical giant BASF invented a process and began to industrially produce polystyrene.Then in 1937, American chemical giant Dow Chemical mastered this technology and further developed it to make polystyrene foam, which is our most troublesome white garbage today. It is a convenience meal that many of us are using now. This is the material used for the box.So it's all because of Germany, they invented this material, and now this material has changed our way of life.What about Germany?Will their environment be worse than ours?On the contrary, Germany's environmental protection is world-class.why?Because they were the first to think about the costs and problems of industrialization!We said today that we should not develop the economy at the expense of the environment. That is entirely our own idea. The fact is that we are developing the economy at the expense of the environment, but the Germans never intended to sacrifice the environment. Germany began to rebuild after World War II. After nearly 20 or 30 years of modern industry, I suddenly found that a large number of fish in the river died, and there seemed to be more and more garbage around me. At that time, the water quality of the Rhine River was much worse than that of the Three Gorges and Qiandao Lake. Several sewage leakage accidents occurred, which aroused their national self-examination again.The result of self-examination is that they are determined to change their way of life. Therefore, several chemical giants in Germany invented ion exchange resin technology, which is also the most famous technology in the field of sewage treatment today.As for the raw materials of plastic products such as polyethylene and polyvinyl chloride, they don't use much themselves, but export and sell them to China in large quantities.And this plastic bag, don't everyone advocate biodegradable plastic bags now?This is also invented by BASF!Although it is still only in the promotion and pilot stage, it can be seen from this that the Germans have turned it into a new round of economy through this kind of introspection. So how can we solve this problem?First, block the industrial chain.Think about how Japan deals with waste oil?Through recycling, that is, the government buys all the waste oil at a price slightly higher than unscrupulous traders are willing to accept, and then gives it to private companies for processing. Finally, this refined oil is used as engine fuel for garbage trucks.In fact, this is in line with the German way of thinking!In the recycling process, more than 60% of the garbage in Germany is collected by private companies. Taking advantage of the profit-seeking nature of private companies, try to pick out recyclable garbage during the garbage collection stage to minimize the total amount of garbage.However, private companies are not allowed to participate in the disposal of garbage to ensure the public welfare and harmlessness of the disposal.The direct result of this is that a large number of German companies have devoted themselves to the waste recycling industry, and even led to "overcapacity" in waste disposal capacity.Now Germany can process nearly 18 million tons of domestic waste every year, while the total annual domestic waste in Germany is only 14 million tons.The reduction of waste has made many waste treatment plants "sufficient", and even have to import waste to meet production capacity needs.For example, in 2009, municipal workers in Italy went on strike, resulting in a large amount of garbage that was not collected and disposed of, and a serious "garbage crisis" emerged across the country. Germany helped Italy dispose of 160,000 tons of garbage. Since the British Industrial Revolution, environmental issues have become the most important issues facing mankind.The history of industrialization in Europe and the United States for more than two hundred years is almost a history of world pollution.So far, European and American countries are still plagued by various environmental problems. In 2009, the American media pointed out that the drinking water of 49 million Americans contained dangerous substances such as arsenic and uranium. According to the investigation of the Associated Press, the American manufacturing industry, including pharmaceutical factories, legally discharged at least 2.71% into rivers and lakes. billion pounds of drugs.Since the 1980s, my country has realized that it can no longer take the old path of developed countries to pollute first and then treat it, and has decided to take environmental protection as a basic national policy.However, the reality before us today is still very grim.According to the "Eleventh Five-Year" plan, during the "Eleventh Five-Year Plan" period, the energy consumption per unit of GDP should be reduced by about 20%, and the total discharge of major pollutants should be reduced by 10%. Energy consumption will drop by more than 6%, and the difficulty will exceed any year in the past four years of the "Eleventh Five-Year Plan". On May 4, 2010, the State Council issued 14 measures to increase energy conservation and emission reduction.At the national teleconference on energy conservation and emission reduction held by the State Council on May 5, Premier Wen Jiabao of the State Council emphasized the need to ensure the realization of the "Eleventh Five-Year" energy conservation and emission reduction goals in the spirit of being highly responsible to the country, the people, and history .So, behind the scenes of energy conservation and emission reduction, what challenges are we facing?
Second, burn them all, but only conditionally.Some readers may ask, aren't Germans afraid of dioxins?Of course, they are also afraid, but they have advanced technology, which can completely avoid the production of dioxins.Do you know how the Germans burn their garbage?Germany has the world's top chemists, and they gathered these people together to study how dioxins are produced?Then they found that during the incineration process of chlorine-containing plastics, if the incineration temperature is lower than 800°C, the chlorine-containing waste cannot be completely burned, and in this case, dioxins are easily generated.After they figured out this mechanism, they came up with three tricks.The first is very strict and meticulous garbage classification to ensure that only substances with high combustion value are burned, instead of putting them into the stove and burning them together like we do.The second is to ensure that there is no chlorine-containing plastic in it before burning. It is best not to have any plastic, because plastic can be crushed, granulated, modified, etc. Classify and finally become recycled materials that can be reused.The third is to add a small amount of diesel to ensure that the temperature of incineration is high enough to avoid the production of dioxins.In this way, the problem of dioxin discharge, which is the most headache for domestic waste disposal enterprises, has been effectively controlled.According to the report of the German Ministry of the Environment in 2005, at present, there are 68 waste incineration plants in Germany, and the annual discharge of dioxins has dropped from 400 grams in 1985 to less than 0.5 grams; British annual emissions accounted for nearly 1/3 of total emissions, and by 2000, this proportion had dropped to less than 1%. Not only that, Germany has even made garbage disposal into a high-profit industry, not only disposing of its own garbage, but also importing a large amount of garbage.Germany has made environmental protection into an industry, accounting for 21% of the global environmental protection industry market share. The environmental protection industry has become an important business in the German economy. In Germany as a whole, waste disposal and recycling have created an output value of more than 40 billion euros, accounting for Germany's GDP. 8% of the total, the entire industry employs more than 200,000 people, and is regarded as the fastest growing industry in Germany. Why do we have such serious heavy metal pollution?Today, Professor Lang, I decided to give you an answer, that is, we did not understand the correct way of economic growth. False economic growth one: at the expense of the environment.If we carefully analyze these domestic cases of mercury poisoning and blood lead pollution, it is not difficult to find that the biggest source of pollution is actually mining, beneficiation and smelting. This phenomenon also appeared one after another in Japan in the 20th century.For example, mercury poisoning. According to the information we found, there were 180 people suffering from Minamata disease in Minamata Town, and more than 50 people died. In Ahe Yechuan, Xinxian County, more than 100 people were also found to be suffering from Minamata disease, and 8 people died; In the case of bone pain, 230 people suffered from bone pain and 34 died because of cadmium pollution; while the Yokkaichi incident in Japan was caused by air pollution caused by the concentration of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere, which led to 871 asthmatic patients in the city. 11 people died. What would happen if this kind of ecological crisis happened in China?It may be to punish the factory, shut it down and turn it over, but if you think that the Japanese government handles the problem in the same way, you are too naive.They started a very deep thinking trend, and they found that if domestic waste is not properly disposed of, the pollution will be worse than factories, and it will become an invisible killer in life.So from then on, Japan began to pay special attention to environmental protection, and passed three very strict environmental protection laws in succession.The result of the legislation is that the Japanese no longer produce batteries in their own country, but plan to sell all the production lines to China, or move to China.Now 80% of the world's lead-acid batteries are produced in China. "Tomoko Takes a Bath" is an American photographer Eugene?The most famous and widely disseminated work in Smith's Minamata monograph. In the early 1950s, in a place called Minamata Town in Kumamoto County in the south of Kyushu Island, Japan, some patients suffered from slurred speech, facial daze, trembling hands and feet, and nervous disorders.There are 40,000 residents in Minamata Town, and 10,000 people have suffered from this disease to varying degrees in several years.After several years of investigation and research by the Japanese government, it was confirmed that the residents of Minamata Town suffered from mercury poisoning due to the discharge of factory wastewater.It is said that during the filming of "Tomoko Takes a Bath", I saw the loving mother Tomoko taking a bath for her disabled daughter, Eugene?With tears in his eyes, Smith could barely press the shutter.In fact, water pollution incidents in Japan are not uncommon in the process of industrialization in Europe and the United States. Since 1952, there have been 12 major smog incidents in Lunjiao.One of them occurred in December 1952, causing more than 4,000 deaths within 5 days.So, what enlightenment should these past accidents bring us?
False economic growth II: at the expense of excessive consumption of oil and raw materials. The first oil crisis, which began in 1973, lasted for three years. During this period, the industrial production of the United States fell by 14%, and the GDP fell by 4.7%.And Japan is much worse than the United States, its industrial production fell by 20%, and its GDP fell by 7%.Japan finds that every time there is a crisis, they are always the ones who suffer the most, because if there is a slight disturbance, Japan will not be able to import raw materials from overseas.For example, the copper raw material urgently needed by the Japanese electronics industry rose to US$3,000 or even higher per ton in 1973, which led to the income growth rate of Japan’s machinery manufacturing, electrical machinery, and transportation machinery industries in 1975. Respectively dropped to -6%, -6% and -8%, profit growth rate dropped to -51%, -45% and 6.4%.Therefore, Japan has begun a deep reflection.What is the result of reflection?They found that if the garbage generated in the city is properly recycled, it is a rare metal deposit. For example, if the copper imported every year, whether it is finally processed into copper wire or copper pipe, if 50% can be recycled, then next year imports can be cut in half.This is why although Japan is also a big manufacturing country, it does not need to import as many raw materials as we do.Not only that, Japan is also wondering, if the combustion efficiency of the engine can be increased by 6%, can oil imports be saved by 6%?That way, they wouldn't have to import as much oil. It is through this transformation that Japan's economy has developed rapidly.In the 10 years since 1973, Japan's GDP has increased by 47%, but its primary energy consumption has only increased by 17%, and its oil consumption per unit of GNP has also dropped by half.Looking at their performance in the field of heavy industry, the status of non-ferrous metals, steel, and chemical industries has also given way to industries such as medicine, transportation machinery, and precision machinery.Therefore, after the second oil crisis that broke out in 1978, although the price of oil soared from US$13 per barrel to US$40 per barrel, the impact on Japan's economy was very small. Wrong economic growth three: at the expense of e-waste and construction waste.Japan's resources are very scarce, but their home appliances are updated very quickly, so a lot of electronic waste is produced.If we all know it, can the Japanese themselves not know it?So what do they do?Therefore, Japan implemented the "Household Appliance Recycling Law", which stipulates that the waste products of the four types of products such as TV sets, washing machines, air conditioners and refrigerators shall be recycled by the manufacturers. If it is necessary to find a way to process it, a large amount of precious metals can be extracted from it, so that Japan does not need to spend so much money on imports. This is the concept of "urban mines" proposed by Japan. In 2008, the Japan Institute of Materials and Materials released a report indicating that the reserves of various metals in Japan's domestic "urban mines" are among the top in the world, calculated according to the ratio of Japanese urban mines to the world's various resource reserves , Japan's gold, silver, indium, and lead are the world's first four metals, copper is the second in the world, platinum is the third in the world, vanadium and chromium are the fourth in the world, and molybdenum and zinc are the fifth in the world.Through this bill, another employment problem has been solved. For example, a home appliance manufacturer has laid off 20% of its employees. Now these people can be placed by emerging electrical recycling companies.After the implementation of this bill, Japan felt that the effect was good, so it proposed the "Automobile Recycling Act", which stipulates that automobile manufacturers are obliged to recycle waste cars and reuse resources.There is also the "Construction Recycling Law", which stipulates that the reuse of waste cement, asphalt, sludge, wood and other resources on construction sites must reach 100%.The reason why I have talked so much about the transformation of Japan's economic development model is that Japan's protection of the environment today, the recycling of household garbage, discarded household appliances, discarded cars and even discarded building materials all come from its attention to every Serious reflection on the crisis.This is worth our thinking and reflection.However, I am very worried that the self-examination ability of our nation is not very poor, but almost non-existent. Biofuel production also faces a glaring, ironic problem.In order to seek pollution-free power fuels, more coal is needed to generate electricity, and coal is the most polluting fossil fuel.In the Midwest and Plains, ethanol plants have either built their own coal-fired boilers to generate the heat or pressure they need, or purchased electricity from local utilities, and they are also working to build coal-fired power plants to accommodate the new need. In a civilization as car-centric as ours, with a global economy so reliant on transportation, liquid fuels are vital.While there are many clean ways to generate electricity, and electricity may in the future become a prime transport power source (discussed further in Chapter 9), there are no immediate alternatives to liquid fuels.Current liquid fuels impose a heavy burden on the nation: the United States emits 1.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year and consumes $820 million in oil every day.Compared with the chemical energy contained in a gallon of diesel or gasoline, petroleum is relatively easier and more convenient to store and transport.As Professor Nate Lewis of Caltech puts it: "You can buy a hose for $5 and put 10 megawatts of oil into your car, but you need high-voltage power lines to deliver 10 megawatts of electricity. Electricity is not like gasoline." That sits there, waiting for you to use it.” Not only do airplanes and cars depend on oil, but so does the $1.5 trillion chemical and plastics industries. Because biofuels are so new and still evolving, biofuel startups have an added advantage in this era of rapid technological change: They can leverage computing, bioscience technology, genetic engineering and other disciplines latest results.In the laboratory, Newman said while inspecting: "There are more than 100 technologies here." By blurring the lines between energy, agriculture and biotechnology, these startups are creating technologies beyond imagination.Companies like BP and Chevron, which hired only geologists and engineers for decades, are now catching up, visiting graduate schools to hire bioengineers.Some of their senior executives have even left the old industry entirely and transitioned to the biofuel industry. This article is excerpted from [US] Fred Krupp, Miriam Horn's "Decisive Battle for New Energy: An Industrial Revolution Affecting the Rise and Fall of Nations"
Do you know what the concept of 500 million square meters is? In 2008, the sales area of commercial housing across the country happened to be 500 million square meters.In other words, the area of land occupied by garbage across the country is about the same as the area of the houses we built in 2008.Do you still feel indifferent?Do you think you can still find a place to bury your garbage?Then let me show you a report published by Chinanews.com on December 30, 2009. The relevant person in charge of the Beijing Municipal City Appearance Management Committee said that currently 90% of Beijing’s waste is landfilled, accounting for about 500 mu of land, and it is still increasing at a rate of 8%.If we fail to build new facilities in time, in 4 years, Beijing will face a severe situation where the garbage cannot be disposed of. Not only Beijing, but many of our large and medium-sized cities have filled or are about to fill their landfills.Shanghai and Guangzhou generate 18,000 tons of garbage every day, and Shenzhen has exceeded 12,000 tons every day.Even in Nanjing, where there is only 4,500 tons of household waste per day, the three existing landfills are about to be saturated.In other words, almost all of our cities are now facing a crisis of garbage siege. Do you think that's enough?What is more terrible than the garbage siege is the garbage pollution! On April 2, 2010, garbage polluted the water source of the Minjiang River and caused large-scale water cutoffs in downtown Chengdu, and this was only a temporary water cutoff.There is also Guiyu in Guangdong. Because it is the world's largest dismantling and dismantling center for electronic waste, its air, soil and groundwater have been seriously polluted. Not only the air is dirty, but the groundwater is also polluted by heavy metals. drank.Not only that, many of our natural rivers have lost their drinking function, such as the Three Gorges. During the rainy season every year, the river surface will be full of garbage after every heavy rain. Sometimes it is even necessary to open the gates to release water to remove part of the garbage to avoid damage to the turbines.There is also Qiandao Lake, which was surrounded by garbage due to continuous precipitation. The local government used more than 100 motor sailboats to clean it up. It took more than two months to clean up the garbage. What is hidden behind this?is a serious e-waste problem.According to the investigation and calculation of experts such as Liang Haoguang from the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, since 2003, Beijing has entered the peak period of scrapping electronic and electrical products.Improper disposal of electronic waste is extremely harmful, especially electronic products such as TVs, computers, mobile phones, and audio systems. These electronic products contain a large amount of toxic and harmful substances, such as lead, cadmium, mercury, chromium, plastics, and flame retardants.According to statistics, the cathode ray tube of each television or computer monitor contains an average of 4 to 8 pounds of lead.Once the lead enters the soil, it will seriously pollute the water source, which will not only harm plants and microorganisms, but also human beings. Lead will have a great impact on children's brain development. Moreover, we are not countries like Japan that pay great attention to environmental protection. We do not have the habit of sorting garbage. We often mix e-waste with domestic garbage and burn it together, resulting in fly ash containing a lot of heavy metal particles, and then the wind blows these Heavy metal particles are carried tens of kilometers, or even hundreds of kilometers away, causing pollution in a larger area.Although incineration facilities have been set up in more than 30 cities in China, few of them have hazardous waste landfills. Considering the design, for example, the hazardous waste landfill in Shanghai can be filled within three years if the incineration fly ash is accepted.There are also more serious problems. Some garbage that should be burned is "turned into treasure" after some simple treatment, such as medical waste. Do you know how harmful it is?According to the statistics of the United Nations, about 5.2 million people die from pollution caused by medical waste every year in the world, of which 4 million are children.What's behind this?Another black industrial chain.These large amounts of medical waste with germs, after simple processing in some workshops, become raw materials for plastic products, flow to the market in large quantities, and then are processed into food bags, plastic packaging bags, plastic buckets, tableware, and thermos pots that we use every day. Enclosures, water pipes, etc. How can there be so much rubbish?It's very simple, everyone, take a look at our own diet and daily life.In the past, when we bought soy sauce, we prepared glass bottles by ourselves, and when we bought vegetables, we prepared cloth bags or bamboo baskets by ourselves. Therefore, the domestic waste generated is basically degradable and can be simply buried. If there is a heavy rain, it will be washed away. In the river, it is regarded as adding bait to the fish, and it does not contain any toxic substances anyway.But now, the situation is not so optimistic.Let's look at the photos of Qiandao Lake and the Three Gorges Garbage Surrounding Lake. What are these garbage?Basically plastic!Because these garbage contains a lot of harmful substances - chlorine, it is very easy to produce dioxins if they are incinerated. When these plastic wastes are in the air, as long as you walk near them, dioxins may infect you.Do you know how serious this infection is?Let me read it to you: Dioxin can cause endocrine disorders in the body, causing infertility and miscarriage in female animals. In male animals, it can reduce the production of sperm cells and feminize male animals.Moreover, it is a fat-soluble substance, which is very easy to accumulate in the body. Once it enters the body, it is estimated that it will not be excreted in this life.So now every time the government proposes to build a waste incineration plant, everyone will unanimously oppose it, so it cannot be incinerated, so how to deal with these wastes?It can only be landfilled, but if it is buried, it will occupy more land and cause a wider range of pollution. Why?Or because our garbage is mixed with plastics, which are difficult to degrade materials. Therefore, in order to really solve this problem, we still need to completely change our way of life and cultivate our awareness of environmental protection, such as developing the habit of sorting garbage, and using as little plastic as possible.Speaking of plastic as a chemical material, I think it is necessary to talk about its source.The basis of all this is the long-chain theory of a German chemist Hermann Staudinger in 1920. In 1930, the German chemical giant BASF invented a process and began to industrially produce polystyrene.Then in 1937, American chemical giant Dow Chemical mastered this technology and further developed it to make polystyrene foam, which is our most troublesome white garbage today. It is a convenience meal that many of us are using now. This is the material used for the box.So it's all because of Germany, they invented this material, and now this material has changed our way of life.What about Germany?Will their environment be worse than ours?On the contrary, Germany's environmental protection is world-class.why?Because they were the first to think about the costs and problems of industrialization!We said today that we should not develop the economy at the expense of the environment. That is entirely our own idea. The fact is that we are developing the economy at the expense of the environment, but the Germans never intended to sacrifice the environment. Germany began to rebuild after World War II. After nearly 20 or 30 years of modern industry, I suddenly found that a large number of fish in the river died, and there seemed to be more and more garbage around me. At that time, the water quality of the Rhine River was much worse than that of the Three Gorges and Qiandao Lake. Several sewage leakage accidents occurred, which aroused their national self-examination again.The result of self-examination is that they are determined to change their way of life. Therefore, several chemical giants in Germany invented ion exchange resin technology, which is also the most famous technology in the field of sewage treatment today.As for the raw materials of plastic products such as polyethylene and polyvinyl chloride, they don't use much themselves, but export and sell them to China in large quantities.And this plastic bag, don't everyone advocate biodegradable plastic bags now?This is also invented by BASF!Although it is still only in the promotion and pilot stage, it can be seen from this that the Germans have turned it into a new round of economy through this kind of introspection. So how can we solve this problem?First, block the industrial chain.Think about how Japan deals with waste oil?Through recycling, that is, the government buys all the waste oil at a price slightly higher than unscrupulous traders are willing to accept, and then gives it to private companies for processing. Finally, this refined oil is used as engine fuel for garbage trucks.In fact, this is in line with the German way of thinking!In the recycling process, more than 60% of the garbage in Germany is collected by private companies. Taking advantage of the profit-seeking nature of private companies, try to pick out recyclable garbage during the garbage collection stage to minimize the total amount of garbage.However, private companies are not allowed to participate in the disposal of garbage to ensure the public welfare and harmlessness of the disposal.The direct result of this is that a large number of German companies have devoted themselves to the waste recycling industry, and even led to "overcapacity" in waste disposal capacity.Now Germany can process nearly 18 million tons of domestic waste every year, while the total annual domestic waste in Germany is only 14 million tons.The reduction of waste has made many waste treatment plants "sufficient", and even have to import waste to meet production capacity needs.For example, in 2009, municipal workers in Italy went on strike, resulting in a large amount of garbage that was not collected and disposed of, and a serious "garbage crisis" emerged across the country. Germany helped Italy dispose of 160,000 tons of garbage. Since the British Industrial Revolution, environmental issues have become the most important issues facing mankind.The history of industrialization in Europe and the United States for more than two hundred years is almost a history of world pollution.So far, European and American countries are still plagued by various environmental problems. In 2009, the American media pointed out that the drinking water of 49 million Americans contained dangerous substances such as arsenic and uranium. According to the investigation of the Associated Press, the American manufacturing industry, including pharmaceutical factories, legally discharged at least 2.71% into rivers and lakes. billion pounds of drugs.Since the 1980s, my country has realized that it can no longer take the old path of developed countries to pollute first and then treat it, and has decided to take environmental protection as a basic national policy.However, the reality before us today is still very grim.According to the "Eleventh Five-Year" plan, during the "Eleventh Five-Year Plan" period, the energy consumption per unit of GDP should be reduced by about 20%, and the total discharge of major pollutants should be reduced by 10%. Energy consumption will drop by more than 6%, and the difficulty will exceed any year in the past four years of the "Eleventh Five-Year Plan". On May 4, 2010, the State Council issued 14 measures to increase energy conservation and emission reduction.At the national teleconference on energy conservation and emission reduction held by the State Council on May 5, Premier Wen Jiabao of the State Council emphasized the need to ensure the realization of the "Eleventh Five-Year" energy conservation and emission reduction goals in the spirit of being highly responsible to the country, the people, and history .So, behind the scenes of energy conservation and emission reduction, what challenges are we facing?
Second, burn them all, but only conditionally.Some readers may ask, aren't Germans afraid of dioxins?Of course, they are also afraid, but they have advanced technology, which can completely avoid the production of dioxins.Do you know how the Germans burn their garbage?Germany has the world's top chemists, and they gathered these people together to study how dioxins are produced?Then they found that during the incineration process of chlorine-containing plastics, if the incineration temperature is lower than 800°C, the chlorine-containing waste cannot be completely burned, and in this case, dioxins are easily generated.After they figured out this mechanism, they came up with three tricks.The first is very strict and meticulous garbage classification to ensure that only substances with high combustion value are burned, instead of putting them into the stove and burning them together like we do.The second is to ensure that there is no chlorine-containing plastic in it before burning. It is best not to have any plastic, because plastic can be crushed, granulated, modified, etc. Classify and finally become recycled materials that can be reused.The third is to add a small amount of diesel to ensure that the temperature of incineration is high enough to avoid the production of dioxins.In this way, the problem of dioxin discharge, which is the most headache for domestic waste disposal enterprises, has been effectively controlled.According to the report of the German Ministry of the Environment in 2005, at present, there are 68 waste incineration plants in Germany, and the annual discharge of dioxins has dropped from 400 grams in 1985 to less than 0.5 grams; British annual emissions accounted for nearly 1/3 of total emissions, and by 2000, this proportion had dropped to less than 1%. Not only that, Germany has even made garbage disposal into a high-profit industry, not only disposing of its own garbage, but also importing a large amount of garbage.Germany has made environmental protection into an industry, accounting for 21% of the global environmental protection industry market share. The environmental protection industry has become an important business in the German economy. In Germany as a whole, waste disposal and recycling have created an output value of more than 40 billion euros, accounting for Germany's GDP. 8% of the total, the entire industry employs more than 200,000 people, and is regarded as the fastest growing industry in Germany. Why do we have such serious heavy metal pollution?Today, Professor Lang, I decided to give you an answer, that is, we did not understand the correct way of economic growth. False economic growth one: at the expense of the environment.If we carefully analyze these domestic cases of mercury poisoning and blood lead pollution, it is not difficult to find that the biggest source of pollution is actually mining, beneficiation and smelting. This phenomenon also appeared one after another in Japan in the 20th century.For example, mercury poisoning. According to the information we found, there were 180 people suffering from Minamata disease in Minamata Town, and more than 50 people died. In Ahe Yechuan, Xinxian County, more than 100 people were also found to be suffering from Minamata disease, and 8 people died; In the case of bone pain, 230 people suffered from bone pain and 34 died because of cadmium pollution; while the Yokkaichi incident in Japan was caused by air pollution caused by the concentration of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere, which led to 871 asthmatic patients in the city. 11 people died. What would happen if this kind of ecological crisis happened in China?It may be to punish the factory, shut it down and turn it over, but if you think that the Japanese government handles the problem in the same way, you are too naive.They started a very deep thinking trend, and they found that if domestic waste is not properly disposed of, the pollution will be worse than factories, and it will become an invisible killer in life.So from then on, Japan began to pay special attention to environmental protection, and passed three very strict environmental protection laws in succession.The result of the legislation is that the Japanese no longer produce batteries in their own country, but plan to sell all the production lines to China, or move to China.Now 80% of the world's lead-acid batteries are produced in China. "Tomoko Takes a Bath" is an American photographer Eugene?The most famous and widely disseminated work in Smith's Minamata monograph. In the early 1950s, in a place called Minamata Town in Kumamoto County in the south of Kyushu Island, Japan, some patients suffered from slurred speech, facial daze, trembling hands and feet, and nervous disorders.There are 40,000 residents in Minamata Town, and 10,000 people have suffered from this disease to varying degrees in several years.After several years of investigation and research by the Japanese government, it was confirmed that the residents of Minamata Town suffered from mercury poisoning due to the discharge of factory wastewater.It is said that during the filming of "Tomoko Takes a Bath", I saw the loving mother Tomoko taking a bath for her disabled daughter, Eugene?With tears in his eyes, Smith could barely press the shutter.In fact, water pollution incidents in Japan are not uncommon in the process of industrialization in Europe and the United States. Since 1952, there have been 12 major smog incidents in Lunjiao.One of them occurred in December 1952, causing more than 4,000 deaths within 5 days.So, what enlightenment should these past accidents bring us?
False economic growth II: at the expense of excessive consumption of oil and raw materials. The first oil crisis, which began in 1973, lasted for three years. During this period, the industrial production of the United States fell by 14%, and the GDP fell by 4.7%.And Japan is much worse than the United States, its industrial production fell by 20%, and its GDP fell by 7%.Japan finds that every time there is a crisis, they are always the ones who suffer the most, because if there is a slight disturbance, Japan will not be able to import raw materials from overseas.For example, the copper raw material urgently needed by the Japanese electronics industry rose to US$3,000 or even higher per ton in 1973, which led to the income growth rate of Japan’s machinery manufacturing, electrical machinery, and transportation machinery industries in 1975. Respectively dropped to -6%, -6% and -8%, profit growth rate dropped to -51%, -45% and 6.4%.Therefore, Japan has begun a deep reflection.What is the result of reflection?They found that if the garbage generated in the city is properly recycled, it is a rare metal deposit. For example, if the copper imported every year, whether it is finally processed into copper wire or copper pipe, if 50% can be recycled, then next year imports can be cut in half.This is why although Japan is also a big manufacturing country, it does not need to import as many raw materials as we do.Not only that, Japan is also wondering, if the combustion efficiency of the engine can be increased by 6%, can oil imports be saved by 6%?That way, they wouldn't have to import as much oil. It is through this transformation that Japan's economy has developed rapidly.In the 10 years since 1973, Japan's GDP has increased by 47%, but its primary energy consumption has only increased by 17%, and its oil consumption per unit of GNP has also dropped by half.Looking at their performance in the field of heavy industry, the status of non-ferrous metals, steel, and chemical industries has also given way to industries such as medicine, transportation machinery, and precision machinery.Therefore, after the second oil crisis that broke out in 1978, although the price of oil soared from US$13 per barrel to US$40 per barrel, the impact on Japan's economy was very small. Wrong economic growth three: at the expense of e-waste and construction waste.Japan's resources are very scarce, but their home appliances are updated very quickly, so a lot of electronic waste is produced.If we all know it, can the Japanese themselves not know it?So what do they do?Therefore, Japan implemented the "Household Appliance Recycling Law", which stipulates that the waste products of the four types of products such as TV sets, washing machines, air conditioners and refrigerators shall be recycled by the manufacturers. If it is necessary to find a way to process it, a large amount of precious metals can be extracted from it, so that Japan does not need to spend so much money on imports. This is the concept of "urban mines" proposed by Japan. In 2008, the Japan Institute of Materials and Materials released a report indicating that the reserves of various metals in Japan's domestic "urban mines" are among the top in the world, calculated according to the ratio of Japanese urban mines to the world's various resource reserves , Japan's gold, silver, indium, and lead are the world's first four metals, copper is the second in the world, platinum is the third in the world, vanadium and chromium are the fourth in the world, and molybdenum and zinc are the fifth in the world.Through this bill, another employment problem has been solved. For example, a home appliance manufacturer has laid off 20% of its employees. Now these people can be placed by emerging electrical recycling companies.After the implementation of this bill, Japan felt that the effect was good, so it proposed the "Automobile Recycling Act", which stipulates that automobile manufacturers are obliged to recycle waste cars and reuse resources.There is also the "Construction Recycling Law", which stipulates that the reuse of waste cement, asphalt, sludge, wood and other resources on construction sites must reach 100%.The reason why I have talked so much about the transformation of Japan's economic development model is that Japan's protection of the environment today, the recycling of household garbage, discarded household appliances, discarded cars and even discarded building materials all come from its attention to every Serious reflection on the crisis.This is worth our thinking and reflection.However, I am very worried that the self-examination ability of our nation is not very poor, but almost non-existent. Biofuel production also faces a glaring, ironic problem.In order to seek pollution-free power fuels, more coal is needed to generate electricity, and coal is the most polluting fossil fuel.In the Midwest and Plains, ethanol plants have either built their own coal-fired boilers to generate the heat or pressure they need, or purchased electricity from local utilities, and they are also working to build coal-fired power plants to accommodate the new need. In a civilization as car-centric as ours, with a global economy so reliant on transportation, liquid fuels are vital.While there are many clean ways to generate electricity, and electricity may in the future become a prime transport power source (discussed further in Chapter 9), there are no immediate alternatives to liquid fuels.Current liquid fuels impose a heavy burden on the nation: the United States emits 1.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year and consumes $820 million in oil every day.Compared with the chemical energy contained in a gallon of diesel or gasoline, petroleum is relatively easier and more convenient to store and transport.As Professor Nate Lewis of Caltech puts it: "You can buy a hose for $5 and put 10 megawatts of oil into your car, but you need high-voltage power lines to deliver 10 megawatts of electricity. Electricity is not like gasoline." That sits there, waiting for you to use it.” Not only do airplanes and cars depend on oil, but so does the $1.5 trillion chemical and plastics industries. Because biofuels are so new and still evolving, biofuel startups have an added advantage in this era of rapid technological change: They can leverage computing, bioscience technology, genetic engineering and other disciplines latest results.In the laboratory, Newman said while inspecting: "There are more than 100 technologies here." By blurring the lines between energy, agriculture and biotechnology, these startups are creating technologies beyond imagination.Companies like BP and Chevron, which hired only geologists and engineers for decades, are now catching up, visiting graduate schools to hire bioengineers.Some of their senior executives have even left the old industry entirely and transitioned to the biofuel industry. This article is excerpted from [US] Fred Krupp, Miriam Horn's "Decisive Battle for New Energy: An Industrial Revolution Affecting the Rise and Fall of Nations"