7 - Waste Management

Summary

Chapter 7 examines waste management from collection, transport, storage to recovery and disposal under the Law on the Prevention and Control of Environmental Pollution by Solid Waste (SWL) (2016). Waste is potentially harmful to both the environment and human health if dumped or disposed of improperly without pollution control measures. But some waste may be recycled or recovered to become resources for production or consumption. The double nature of waste as environmental harm and potentially valuable resources has led to the waste management hierarchy, which gives priority to waste reduction, recycling and recovery over waste disposal by incineration and landfill. The chapter discusses key principles of waste management including the waste hierarchy, lifecycle management, proximity principle and polluter pays principle, and examines the command-and-control approach to waste management including standard-setting, monitoring, inspection and sanction. It further investigates different instruments to control pollution by industrial solid waste, municipal solid waste and hazardous waste respectively. The chapter concludes with discussion of waste import and China’s war against pollution by garbage import.