Task Group Materials

Facilitation of sustainable megacity development through a material efficient economy

Urumqi is the capital of the “Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region” and is the largest province in North West China. From a geographical perspective, Urumqi is located in a highly sensitive, semi-arid environment within a narrow irrigated “green belt” between high mountains and desert. Nevertheless, in the last 60 years Urumqi has developed from a town of 100,000 inhabitants to a bustling 3.1 million strong metropolis, which is now rightly being called the “Regional Capital of Central Asia”. Taking into account the current administrative reform, involving a merger with the Changji Region, Urumqi is today the largest metropolitan area in Central Asia. Although the city’s tireless pace of development over the last two decades is still reliant on the richness of the region’s natural resources such as coal, oil, gas and salt, it continues to diversify in its expansion of the manufacturing industries, which extends even to the automotive industry. As a consequence, industrial areas too are developing at a fast pace, which creates challenges concerning resources and the environment not only to the city, but also to the region as a whole. In actual fact, the amount of industrial waste produced in Xinjiang Province doubled in the period between 2008 and 2011 to 50 million tonnes, while the increase in population and prosperity has driven the growth of municipal waste up by 13.3 % p.a. to 1.3 million tonnes (Xinjiang Statistical Yearbook 2011/2012). Urumqi is still responding to these developments today, mainly by increasing its landfill capacities as well as by building new landfill sites with floor sealing which is in line with international standards. The separation of municipal waste is by in large limited to the selective recycling interests of informal rubbish collectors. As for the recycling of industrial waste, we only know of examples from the metal industry (iron, aluminium). Strategic guidelines such as the current 12th Five Year Plan, which promotes an environmentally friendly and recycling-oriented approach to dealing with the rapidly increasing amounts and types of waste, has not yet been adequately implemented.