A joint resource recycling project has recently been launched by six provincial regions to handle the industrial waste that surrounds Beijing. The project aims to dispose 400 million tones of industrial solid waste by 2017.
Beijing will spearhead the recycling project and counts on its surrounding municipalities, which include the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, as well as the provinces of Hebei, Shanxi and Shandong, for the success of the project.
The main goal of the project is to develop an industry that allows the municipalities and provincial regions to recycle 20 million tones of resources every year, eventually amounting to an output value of 220 billion yuan come 2017.
Other effects expected to branch out of the recycling resource project are the promotion of regional coordinated development and the alleviation of environmental and resource restrictions.
Mao Weiming, the deputy head of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), also hopes that the project will foster new economic growth in the provincial regions.
The recycling resource project is part of an interprovincial program between Beijing, Hebei Province and the Tianjin Municipality that aims to work toward integrated development and environmental protection.
The recent years have seen the water quality in Beijing and its surrounding regions decline due to the large chunk of industrial solid waste dumped on their waters. In 2014, an estimated 2.37 billion tones of industrial solid waste (over 70 percent of the country's total) was produced by Beijing and its surrounding regions alone.
Aside from water pollution, Beijing and its neighboring areas also suffer from a massive amount of pollutants that exceed annual emissions of motor vehicles in the country.
According to Bi Junsheng from the MIIT, resource recycling might be the solution to eliminate the growing industrial waste threat in the country, but lack of integration as well as technological difficulties pose several obstacles toward the dream of achieving environmental protection and stability.