Daily Dose of Environmental Consciousness: China in 2020

Here’s your daily dose of environmental consciousness, think about this for a moment, please.

According to China Daily newspaper China is in dire danger of drowning in its own waste if the the general development of the economy and urbanization keeps going on at the rate it does now, and you don’t really need to be a psychic or a fortune-teller in order to predict the future of China. Yes, it will go on like that.

According to the calculations/predictions, in 2020 China will produce close to 400 million tons of garbage. This equals the amount of waste that was produced the whole world in the year 1997. It is also predicted that in 2020 860 million Chinese will be living cities. This will put an enormous strain on the waste management of the cities. Currently only about 50% of the garbage produced can be recycled and/or post-processed in a environmentally friendly way while the rest is just dumped and piled up like in the photo above.

So the Blade Runner/William Gibson/Judge Dredd –style of highly urbanized dystopian vision of the Mega-Cities is coming true, maybe sooner than we thought? Then again, if you look at the positive side of things, there will be endless business opportunities to be explored in the Chinese waste managment business. Time to invest in some stocks now?