no more trash-fired powerplants
Posted by wangbo in Environment, news on September 10, 2008
新京报/The Beijing News reports that the Ministry of Environmental Protection, State Development and Reform Commission, and the Energy Resources Bureau (but wait, that’s a branch of the SDRC, but the report seems to list them separately….) have decided no more trash-fired powerplants should be built in urban areas. I wonder…. Could there be a connection?
城区禁止新建垃圾焚烧电厂
Forbidden to build new trash-fired powerplants in urban areas
垃圾焚烧发电厂一般不得在城市建成区新建。昨日，环保部、国家发改委、国家能源局下发通知，要求加强生活垃圾焚烧发电厂等发电项目的环保管理。
Trash-fired powerplants should in general not be constructed in built-up urban areas. Yesterday the Ministry of Environmental Protection, State Development and Reform Council and Energy Resources Bureau announced they require a strengthening of the environmental management of domestic trash-fired powerplants and other power generation projects.
两部委要求，垃圾焚烧发电厂等生物质发电项目一般不得在城市建成区中新建。同时，还应根据恶臭等污染物排放情况，明确合理的防护距离。作为与周围居民区以及学校、医院等公共设施的控制间距，新改扩建项目的防护距离不得小于300米。
The ministry and commission require that trash-fired powerplants and other biomass power generation projects should in general not be constructed in urban built-up areas. At the same time, they should also make clear a reasonable protective gap according to the situation of the emissions of foul smells or other pollutants. Renovation and extension projects should maintain a distance of no less than 300 metres from surrounding residential areas, schools, hospitals and other public facilities.
在排放标准方面，这类发电项目必须确保烟气中的二氧化硫等酸性气体及其他常规烟气污染物达到国家标准；对二恶英排放浓度则参照执行欧盟的标准。
For emissions standards, this kind of power generation project must ensure that sulfur dioxide and other acidic gases and other common pollutants in the smoke meet national standard. For dioxin emissions, however, they must implement EU standards.
环保部还要求，对于这些发电项目的环评，应增加公众参与的透明度，适当组织座谈会、交流会使公众与相关人员进行沟通交流。对于环境敏感、争议较大的项目，地方政府负责对公众的解释工作，必要时召开听证会。
The Ministry of Environmental Protection also requires that these power generation projects should increase the transparency of public consultations in their environmental assessment, organise appropriate conferences and consultation to communicate with the public and relevant people. For projects of greater environmental sensitivity or controversy, local governments are responsible for explaining to the public, and hold hearings when necessary.
Alright, so I thoroughly buggered up that translation, I’m sure. In my defence, being three quarters of the way through this weeks lessons and having a lot of other work stuff to deal with, I’m tired, and I seem to have been smacked hard in the nose with some allergy almost as bad as what I had to put up with in Changsha. Anyway:
Step forwards? Step backwards? Step sideways? I’m calling this a step forward. Using rubbish for fuel is clearly better than just dumping it, but you can’t put stinky, polluting powerplants in the middle of residential areas or near schools or hospitals. Obviously appropriate locations must be chosen for such projects.
That said, I still have no sympathy for those rich bastards who bought apartments in the new fancy housing developments around Gaoantun without bothering to check what was in the neighbourhood.
cool new blog
I almost forgot, I mean, I’m just a little bit shattered after re-entry into the real world of work and earning a living after such an (unexpectedly) easy summer, so forgive me, but I almost forgot to do this post, but… I’ve noticed another Josh floating around the English-language China blogosphere for a while now, but for whatever stupid reason hadn’t really checked out who this guy is…. then I look in a little more detail, and see
Xinjiang!
Awesome! There are far too many bloggers like me in the big cities of the East, but there just aren’t enough bloggers out in these far-flung places, and it seems this guy Josh (and Tiffany, too, perhaps) can write, so check it out.
If for no other reason than because China is an extremely large and surprisingly diverse country, follow that link.
rain-collecting ponds
Posted by wangbo in Environment, news on September 9, 2008
新京报/The Beijing News is reporting that 15 rainwater-collecting ponds will be built along the Yongding River. This is excellent news in a city so desperately short of water.
永定河建15个雨水收集湖
15 rainwater collecting lakes built along the Yongding River
年蓄水可近100万立方米，将用于浇灌河床绿地
Can collect close to 1 million cubic metres of water per year which is used to irrigate green spaces along the river bed.
丰台区水务局昨天发布，永定河丰台段西堤建成了15个雨水收集湖，年蓄水可近100万立方米。
Yesterday the Fengtai District water department announced that 15 rainwater collecting lakes have been built along the west bank of the Yongding River as it runs through Fengtai, which collect close to 1 million cubic metres of water each year.
丰台区水务局负责人介绍，15个雨水收集湖中，最大的湖能蓄水18万立方，15个收集湖年集水能力达100万立方米，可以浇灌河床绿地 150万平方米。“今年雨水较多，目前15个湖中都积蓄了雨水，收集雨水量达70万立方米。河床120万平方米的人工绿地都可以浇上水。”
The person responsible at the Fengtai District water department said that among the 15 rainwater collecting lakes, the biggest can collect 180 thousand cubic metres. “This year there was more rain, currently the 15 lakes all have water stored, there is up to 700 thousand cubic metres of water stored. 1.2 million square metres of man-made green space can be irrigated.”
“这些表面独立的雨水湖，其实它们之间都用地下输水管道相连通。这样可以解决每个湖之间雨水水量不等的问题，均匀调配浇灌绿地和草坪。”这位负责人说。
“These apparently independent rainwater lakes are in fact linked up by a series of underground water pipes. This waywe can resolve the problem of unequal water levels in the lakes and share the water out evenly through the lawns to be irrigated,” the person responsible said.
此外，雨水收集湖不但可以减少永定河水土流失，而且能缓解永定河汛期因雨量过大而导致的水位上涨，把西堤汇下来的水引到湖内有利于泄洪。
In addition, the rainwater collection ponds can not only reduce erosion along the Yongding River, but can alleviate the increase of water levels due to rainfall in the flood season, benefitting from the release of floodwaters by gathering them into the lakes of the west bank.
And no, I don’t really get that last ‘sentence’ (而且能缓解永定河汛期因雨量过大而导致的水位上涨，把西堤汇下来的水引到湖内有利于泄洪。) and so advice and corrections are most welcome. Really. I am doing this for language study, after all. But lzh says it’s ok, so….
Anyway, I first took this as a future tense article: Fengtai will build rainwater collection lakes. But then that second paragraph seems to me to be talking about rainwater already collected. If I’m wrong, tell me, of course. But whether it’s recent past, present or future, it’s good news. This city The entire northern and western halves of China, and a surprisingly large part of those southern areas thought to be water-rich are desperately short of water, and any thing done to alleviate that shortage is good. If it fails, it’s a chance to learn, so it’s still good (provided, of course, those responsible do the learning required), and rainwater collection has got to be a good idea. This is, after all, water brought up from the south and east collected here.
rain
Posted by wangbo in life in Beijing, weather on September 9, 2008
Such wet weather. Good. Rain is good.
Wow, back into a full schedule and it hurts. Literally. My legs are aching from walking up and down so many stairs. Some bright spark decided to put most of my classes on the top floor of Building 1, two on the top floor of the IT building, and the remaining one class on the third floor of Building 1. And yesterday was four straight writing classes, three on the top floor of Building 1 and the last on the top floor of the IT building.
Met the first of my first year classes this morning, and I’m as impressed as I can be having met only one class only once. A good start, in other words.
And the advantage of my timetable is that, although Monday is pretty exhausting, by Tuesday lunch time half my classes, including half my writing classes are out of the way, leaving a relatively relaxed week.
And the advantage of Mid-Autumn Festival this year is that we get next Monday off, meaning I get the maximum possible advantage out of this holiday. Sweet.
closing ceremony
blah…….
Yeah, it wasn’t much. I liked the kids in Tiananmen Square doing the countdown, that was cool. And the guy in the wheelchair hoisting himself up to light the flame was a million times better than Li Ning’s Superman impression. But oompaloompas on speed dressed in condoms? Doing some weird chaotic dance? wtf? I think the Paralympians were short-changed. Yeah, I was really disappointed with that.
Still, two TVs- ours and Roubaozi’s- being broken didn’t help much. We wound up having to watch the online broadcast on Roubaozi’s computer- had we thought things through we should’ve come back here and watched it on our big computer. And watching that broadcast meant having to install something from Sogou- I hope Roubaozi remembered to uninstall it as soon as we were done watching- which meant seeing just how anal Vista can be with endless warnings and requests for permission.
Anyways, disappointing. Zhang Yimou showed with the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics just how awesome a show he can put on. Seems like his Paralympics opening ceremony was a mere afterthought. Disappointing.
Still, the kids in Tiananmen Square and the lighting of the flame were cool.
corrida
This piece begins with a masterful recounting of a bullfight in which the both the drama and the horrifying, fascinating art of the spectacle are fully realised. Reading it one can almost hear the blare of the trumpets and roar of the crowd and smell the dust, sweat and blood. It inspires respect for the bull and a certain horrified admiration for its fighters.
Unfortunately it then moves to rather confused, disjointed discussion of the ethics of the bullfight, and to a lesser extent animal rights in general. Good points are made, but they seem to be lost in a confusing mess of other good points. It is, perhaps, right to point out the hypocrisy of Brits who happily consume factory-farmed red meat purely for aesthetic reasons, yet consider the bullfight somehow immoral. I’m not sure of the wildlife documentary example. One would think that people don’t watch those for the cheap thrill of watching lions hunt, kill and eat wildebeest (but I suspect there probably are a few weirdos who do). But I do like this paragraph:
This brings us to the heart of the matter: the question of animal rights. I do not believe animals have rights in the strict ethical sense of the word. If they did, they would have duties to uphold those rights for themselves, which is a risible notion. It would also follow that we would have a duty to prevent the lion from killing the wildebeest on Big Cat Diary, which would be an obscene act. However, even if one believes that attributing rights to animals is a nonsense, “it would not follow,” to quote Roger Scruton’s 1996 book, Animal Rights and Wrongs, “that we can treat them as we choose. It may still be the case… that certain ways of treating them are vicious and that there are only some ways of treating them that a good person would contemplate.”
a response?
Posted by wangbo in Environment, news on September 5, 2008
A while ago I translated an article about a trash-powered power plant built on the site of a landfill at Gaoantun in Chaoyang District. Well, it seems all is not as rosy as that article suggested, and one problem alluded to turned into a bit of strife out that way. And now 新京报/The Beijing News’ Wu Di has an article on the issue:
高安屯垃圾场臭味 政府承诺20天内改善
Government vows to ameliorate Gaoantun landfill stench within 20 days
市政管委承诺20天内改善高安屯垃圾场臭味，将投9100万治污
Municipal administration commission vows to ameliorate Gaoantun landfill stench within 20 days, will invest 9.1 million in pollution control
“高安屯垃圾卫生填埋场存在的臭味，确实对周边居民正常生活带来了影响，对此，我代表政府向居民表示歉意……”昨天，在朝阳区政府组织的发布会上，该区市政管委负责人承诺，在20天内有效改善该垃圾场臭味。
“The stench at Gaoantun landfill has in fact impacted the normal lives of residents in surrounding areas, and for this I apologise to the residents on behalf of the government… ” Yesterday, at the press conference organised by the Chaoyang District government, the person in charge of the district’s municipal administration commission vowed to effectively ameliorate the landfill’s stench within 20 days.
高安屯垃圾场超负荷运转
Gaoantun landfill overloaded
据介绍，根据居民反映，朝阳区组织专家对高安屯垃圾卫生填埋场的臭味问题，进行了现场勘察和监测，发现臭味源主要来于三个方面：一是该 垃圾填埋场自2002年底开始运转到现在，目前已经到了填埋垃圾产生沼气的旺盛期，沼气产量急剧增加。二是，今年雨量较大，生活垃圾含水量增多。由于填埋 场处于运转期，还不能对雨水进行彻底隔离，造成渗沥液增多而产生出臭味。三是超负荷运行带来暴露作业面积气味的挥发。
It is reported that based on residents’ reports, Chaoyang District organised experts to reconnoitre and monitor the area where the Gaoantun landfill’s stench was a problem, discovering that the stench came from three main areas: One was that the landfill had been operating from the end of 2002 until now, and has currently entered the period of vigorous methane production and the amount of methane produced has rapidly increased. The second was that this year had seen relatively more rain, and there was much more domestic waste containing water. Because the landfill is still in operation and still can not thoroughly isolate rain water, much more leachate was produced, emitting a foul smell.
The third was that the overloading of the operation revealed the volatility of the work area’s odour.[See the Ji Village News comment for a clearer rendition of this sentence].
[Help! That last sentence in particular was less than clear to me, and I’m sure that paragraph is littered with so many areas it stinks worse than the landfill!]
朝阳区市政管委相关负责人称，高安屯垃圾场当初设计的处理能力是每日一千吨，但随着城市发展，垃圾处理量急剧增长。从去年以来，高安屯垃圾场的处理量达到每天3400-3700吨。
The person in charge at the Chaoyang District municipal administration commission said that the handling capacity of Gaoantun landfill’s original design was 1000 tons per day, but with the city’s development, the amount of rubbish handled had increased rapidly. From last year on, the amount of rubbish handled at Gaoantun landfill has reached 3400 – 3700 tons per day.
The next section gets into technical details that leave me stumped. There’s something about high poles that atomise the stinky gases? I dunno. There’s also talk of installing negative-pressure air pumps that gather up stinky smells that aren’t concentrated enough to burn, concentrates them, and uses them to produce electricity. And there’s more that I just can’t figure out (and it doesn’t help that my wife has suddenly decided to trim my sideburns as I type…). Oh, and they’re going to wrap the landfill in a giant membrane so the stinky gases can’t get out. If anybody more familiar with the technical stuff wants to have a go at translating that, go right ahead.
And there are related articles at the end, too, but I don’t have the energy for that right now.
Anyways, it seems that the concerns expressed by the local residents have gotten quite a swift and decisive and positive reaction from the government.
‘scuse me while I rant a lot
Posted by wangbo in tilting at windmills on September 5, 2008
Dear New Zealand media,
Will you please just stop using the words “philosophical” and “critical”? Please? Pretty pretty please with a cherry on top?
And what sparked this? Well, take a look at the blurb from this article:
Dialysis patient Gordon Power was philosophical about his 20-hour wait in Wellington Hospital’s emergency department.
Yes, that’s right, he spent his 20-hour wait in emergency reading Immanuel Kant. Wellington Hospital is good like that, they have a nice big stack of philosophy books waiting for patients who have to be [excuse me, I just can’t resist this] be patient. It’s even worse, though, when it’s a sports report. I mean, things like “All Blacks philosophical after loss to Pitcairn Island B”. That’s right, the first thing the NZRFU does when the All Blacks lose is hand out copies of Sartre’s La Nausée. Nothing like a good dose of Existentialism to get them back on a winning track.
And how often do we have to read shite like “Man critical after head-on collision with drunk goat” or “Goat critical after being impaled on goose’s beak”? Doctors may well use the word critical as in “He is in a critical condition”, meaning “there’s a damn good chance he’s going to die, his injuries are so bad we just can’t tell”, but that does not mean the word ‘critical’ on its own has anything close to that meaning. That is a very specific use of the adjective ‘critical’, and it only has that meaning in that particular context. The man who collided with a drunk goat did not suddenly start discussing with the attendant journalists the rights and wrongs of Farmer Joe feeding Speight’s Old Dark to his flock of goats, nor did the goat pontificate on the goose’s decision to try and run up the guts, thereby impaling the poor goat on his beak, when he clearly should’ve passed the ball out to the mongoose on the wing who was unmarked and had a nice big gap to sprint through for the match saving try.
So please just stop.
And yes, I do realise I am by no means the first to comment on the media’s rather idiotic use of words such as “philosophical” and “critical”.
Have to give stuff full marks for this headline, though:
Injustice killing Kiwis on grand scale
huh?
So what does one do when the TV simply stops? I mean, just stops? Suddenly, without any warning, all lights go off, nothing’s on the tube, just plain stops? And no other electric appliance has any problem whatsoever. I checked everything, of course, from the plug through the on/off button to the fuse box. No obvious problems. Meaning: Nothing. There’s nothing wrong that I can see without opening up the TV, and not being any kind of electrician let alone a TV repairman, I don’t want to do that. I mean, seeing that the TV was plugged in to one socket that hosted no other appliance, I first checked the fusebox, where nothing was in any way out of the ordinary, then I plugged it into the multibox that hosts both the fully-functional fridge and equally fully-functional (so far as one can tell without a functioning TV) DVD player, and still the TV is stone cold dead.
Well, fearing that some undetected problem whose only symptom so far has been the apparent death of the TV may lead to one of those catastrophic self-destructions cathode ray tubes are sometimes known to indulge in, I’ve left it unplugged and I’ll have another look in the morning.
one down
Posted by wangbo in life in Beijing on September 4, 2008
Well, that’s my first week back at work done. Pretty easy re-introduction, really, only four lessons. Well, I have four writing lessons on Mondays, and this Monday there were no classes, and the first years register on Sunday, have their opening ceremony on Monday, and start classes on Tuesday, all of which means that this week I only had half of my writing classes and none of my speaking classes, and it was beautifully arranged so that I saw each writing class once, meaning all I’ve had to do is the usual introductory lesson. Well, re-introductory, really, since I’ve taught these kids before.
But this all also means that next week I’ll be on my full timetable, 24 teaching hours. Oh joy. I am so looking forward to that. Really.
Did I mention already that we really need at least one more teacher?