Page 85 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

CHAPTER 6

From “Waste Village” to “Urban

Circular Economic System”: The
Changing Landscape of Waste in Beijing

Xin Tong

INTRODUCTION
The growth of municipal solid waste (MSW) has become a pressing
environmental challenge in many cities in China. As in other countries, the
increasing demands for waste disposal, the rise of not-in-my-backyard
(NIMBY) objections to facilities close to residential areas and the shortage
of sites for landfills are prompting a search for alternative strategies to solve
the problem (Davoudi 2000). Among these, the 3R concept (reduce, reuse
and recycle) has been promoted in China as a key component in the
national strategy for constructing a “Circular Economy” (Yuan et al.
2006). However, the evolution of the urban waste management system has
proved to be a typically wicked problem for contemporary Chinese society.
Social approaches or technical solutions have proved to be inseparably
bound up with a broad range of social, economic and environmental issues,
prompting clashes of conflicting values among the various agents and
decision makers involved (Churchman 1967). Moreover, both the defini-
tion of waste and social acceptable solutions for waste disposal have

X. Tong (&)
Peking University, Beijing, China
e-mail: ongxin@urban.pku.edu.cn

© The Author(s) 2017 71
B. Brevini and G. Murdock (eds.), Carbon Capitalism and Communication,
Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57876-7_6