Beijing Uses Giant Deodorant Guns to Sweeten Landfill Stench

In response to furious protests by local residents, Beijing city officials installed 100 high-pressure fragrance sprays to cover the stench generated from overflowing landfills.

Now, I’ve heard of everything. Nothing like using an over-sized Frebreze bottle to try and cover-up the trashy smell around your city. I can’t help believing there must be a better way to handle the city’s overflowing landfill problem. I know some folks prefer to use band-aids on this type of issue, but this is ridiculous.

According to The Guardian, these deodorant guns can spray dozens of liters of fragrance per minute over a distance of 50 meters. The guns are produced by several Chinese companies and based on German and Italian technology. Oh but wait, it gets even better. Beijing authorities say they will also apply more plastic layers to cover the landfill site. Huh?

China’s waste problem is expanding as fast as its economy, at about 8% each year. The local government estimates that Beijing’s 17 million people generate 18,000 tons of waste every day – 7,000 tons more than the capacity their municipal disposal plants. Even more frightening, less than 4% of Beijing’s garbage is recycled while 2% is burned. And the rest, well, is dumped in landfills.

So out come the giant deodorant guns… Am I the only one who thinks this is a very bad idea?

Follow Cindy on Twitter @ethicalbiz
Image credit: penwuji.com

2 thoughts on “Beijing Uses Giant Deodorant Guns to Sweeten Landfill Stench”

  1. For those of us with chemical sensitivities, MCS/EI, or simply allergies, this kind of problem solving leads me back to a question we all need to ask public officials whenever we get the opportunity …Where would you have us live? Long term quality of life will always be a balance between population quantity, population impacts, and carrying capacity of the environment. Market based economies can’t help but fall into the trap of ‘Quarterly Objectives’, leading to a world covered in cancers, scientists chasing their tails, human rights abuses, and plenty of needless suffering. While all of this makes great novels, there is a type of mad industrial beauty in most of these anything-goes Monster Band-Aids, the end-product is not a place I wish to call Home.

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