Riccardo Liguori China’s waste-to-energy industry is collapsing under its own success: incinerators built to burn mountains of trash are now running out of fuel as recycling finally takes hold.
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Some people pay to get hold of it, while others go as far as digging into old landfills to bring it back. No, this isn’t about hidden treasures—it’s about ordinary trash. In China, a country that for an entire generation struggled with the “garbage sieges” surrounding its megacities, waste has suddenly become such a scarce resource that it is throwing a colossal industry into crisis. An unthinkable short circuit, revealed by an investigation from the Financial Times.
The gamble of building the biggest network in the world
The roots of the problem lie in a gamble, one perhaps too ambitious. To stem the rising tide of waste, Beijing built the largest network of waste-to-energy plants in the world. More than one thousand facilities—an industrial “firepower” capable of swallowing over half of the planet’s incineration capacity.
As Zhang Jingning of the Wuhu Ecology Center, an NGO monitoring the sector, told the British daily, “Incineration was a relatively quick solution” to the country’s chaotic urbanization.
Quick, indeed, but perhaps too quick. By 2022, China’s treatment capacity—about 367 million short tons (333 million metric tons)—already exceeded the volume of waste actually produced, roughly 343 million short tons (311 million metric tons). Today, that gap has widened further, leaving the giants of incineration starved of fuel.
Plants going idle
The result is a cry of alarm coming directly from operators. “We have three incinerators, but one is closed all year because of insufficient waste supply,” confessed a manager at a plant in Shijiazhuang, blaming demographic decline and a slowing economy. His conclusion was bitter: “We already earned very little, but now we are losing money year after year.”
This “hunger for trash” is triggering a desperate hunt. Some facilities go so far as to pay for deliveries of garbage, others turn to construction debris, and still others break the last taboo: returning to excavate the landfills of the past. “Waste reduction has an impact on profitability,” admitted an operator in Anhui with a disarming frankness.
An environmental legacy that refuses to vanish
Behind the financial crisis lies an environmental legacy that does not disappear with idle furnaces. Even when running at reduced capacity, these plants generate leachate and fly ash. According to China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment, in 2024 alone they produced 14.3 million short tons (13 million metric tons) of ash, but only 15 percent of it was reused. The property crisis has collapsed demand for construction materials, leaving mountains of waste ash with nowhere to go.
Yet, within this paradox, there is an undeniable silver lining. If trash is becoming scarce, it is also because recycling policies are finally working. Stricter rules on waste sorting, introduced back in 2017, are paying off. Shenzhen, a megalopolis of 18 million residents, already sends zero household waste to landfills. A small revolution that proves a more sustainable model is not just theoretical—it is already happening.
As one operator from Zhejiang summed it up to the Financial Times: “Having less waste is actually a good thing. It means the environment is improving.” The reflection is almost ironic for an industry built to destroy trash, and now itself threatened by its very absence.
