Look to N. Europe for greener cities

On Thursday, China Daily reported that Beijing was heading toward a "garbage crisis". In the next four to five years all of Beijing's 13 landfills will be full. The landfills are already having to accommodate more than their capacity - the city generates 18,000 tons of garbage a day against the landfills' capacity of 11,000 tons. It has been suggested that incineration is the only solution to the problem. But that is not true. For organic wastes, centralized co-digestion after industrial separation is now the viable alternative to incineration.

The International Energy Agency estimates that in 2005, 185 anaerobic digestion plants had the capacity to process 5 million metric tons of municipal solid and organic industrial wastes to generate 600 MW of electricity. The potential for biogas production is much larger. A report by CIVITAS Initiative estimates that European biogas production could meet 12-20 percent of the continent's natural gas demand.