HANGZHOU: Wang Aifen starts her day with a simple act of green living, placing a bag of waste into a smart sorting bin as her phone pings, “Your disposal has been recorded.”
With that text message on her phone, her trash begins its digital journey, tracked all the way to a waste-to-energy plant in Hangzhou, a tech hub in east China’s Zhejiang Province.
In the past, waste management operators had to manually monitor roaring furnaces, a grueling and imprecise task. Today, they oversee a giant screen where AI and nine temperature sensors guide the incineration in real time, boosting efficiency and sharply reducing harmful emissions such as dioxins.
“It’s a metamorphosis,” said Zheng Rendong, a former landfill engineer who has witnessed a revolution that transforms garbage into energy for homes, gas for municipal pipelines, and raw materials that return to production lines.
In 2024 alone, waste-to-energy electricity in Hangzhou reached 2.3 billion kilowatt-hours, meaning one in every 50 kilowatt-hours used in homes came from trash.
This is a major step in China’s ambitious push toward “zero-waste” cities, combining digital innovation, circular economy and community mobilization to turn a challenge into an engine for sustainable growth.
Hangzhou, with an annual economic output exceeding 2 trillion yuan (about 287 billion U.S. dollars) and a population of more than 12.6 million, has been selected in 2026 as one of the “20 Cities Towards Zero Waste” by the United Nations Secretary-General’s Advisory Board on Zero Waste. –Agencies
