“Our standard of living is improving, so it’s natural that more and more of us begin to fight for a better quality of life,” said Zhang Jianhua, 67, one of the petitioners.
“Widespread media coverage embarrassed the local government, so they finally decided to take action,” she said.
After millennia as a farming society, China expects to be majority urban in five years.
Busy families are shifting from fresh to packaged foods, consumption of which rose 10.8 percent a year from 2000 to last year, well above the 4.2 percent average in Asia, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council said. By 2013, the packaged-food market is expected to reach US$195 billion, up 74 percent from last year.
At least 85 percent of China’s 6.3 billion tonnes of trash is in landfills, much of it in unlicensed dumps in the countryside. Most have only thin linings of plastic or fiberglass. Rain drips heavy metals, ammonia and bacteria into the groundwater and soil, and the decomposing stew sends out methane and carbon dioxide.
“If the government doesn’t step up efforts to solve our garbage woes, China will likely face an impending health crisis in the coming decade,” warns Liu Yangsheng (劉陽生), an expert in waste management at Peking University.
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