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China has turned a huge part of a waste treatment facility in Guangzhou into a public attraction. A former chimney at the Fushan Circular Economy Industrial Park has been transformed into a 120-metre-high tower, allowing visitors to look across the site from above.
The facility processes thousands of tonnes of household waste every day and has become a popular tourist attraction. This development shows how waste treatment is shifting in China, with rubbish increasingly being processed for energy and material recovery instead of simply being buried.
The 120-metre tower overlooking an 8,000-tonne waste plant
The tower stands at the Fushan Circular Economy Industrial Park in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province. The State Council Information Office reports that the former chimney was converted into a 120-metre-high tower.Xinhua reported that the facility has been developed with a garden-like setting. Visitors can climb the tower, enjoy coffee and take in a panoramic view of the site. The location has also become part of a national 3A-level tourist attraction.The setting gives an unique public face to an operation that normally remains out of sight. Beneath the tower, the facility deals with 8,000 tonnes of household waste every day, making it one of the large-scale waste treatment sites serving the city.
China is moving towards a different way of treating waste
The Guangzhou facility forms part of a wider change in China's approach to household rubbish. Xinhua reported that the country has been moving away from relying on landfill and towards methods that can recover energy and useful materials from waste.The scale of urban rubbish has made that change increasingly important. Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen each generate more than 20,000 tonnes of household waste a day, according to Xinhua.
In earlier years, large quantities of rubbish accumulated in landfills around some cities.The shift means waste is increasingly treated as a material that can still provide value after it has been discarded. Incineration has become a major part of that system, with modern plants using the heat produced during burning to generate electricity and, in some cases, supply heat or steam to industry.
What happens when household waste is incinerated
According to Xinhua, most of China's household waste is now incinerated instead of simply buried.
Modern facilities can use the heat generated during the process to produce electricity, while some also supply heat to nearby industrial users.Foshan, also in Guangdong, provides one example. Its eco-industrial park processes 4,500 tonnes of household waste each day. The high-temperature steam produced during treatment is supplied through pipelines to nearby factories, where it replaces fossil fuels.The process is also designed to control harmful emissions.
Xinhua reports that modern incinerators operate their furnaces at temperatures above 850 degrees Celsius, allowing dioxins to be broken down. Activated carbon, bag filters and other systems are then used to deal with substances remaining in the flue gas.Shanghai's Laogang Waste Disposal Base provides another example. Xinhua says much of its operation, including unloading, fermentation, incineration and emissions monitoring, is automated.
Its flue-gas pollutants are described as being near zero, with the facility performing beyond Chinese national and European Union standards.
Turning waste ash into useful material
Waste treatment does not end with incineration. The material left behind can also be processed and reused. Xinhua reports that bottom ash accounts for about 20% of the waste and contains materials such as iron, copper, aluminium and small quantities of gold and silver.At the Fushan Circular Economy Industrial Park, ash produced in 2025 was processed into material for environmentally friendly bricks used in roads and buildings.
The quantity processed was about 600,000 tonnes.The figures also show how quickly incineration has expanded in China. Official data cited by Xinhua states that incineration accounted for 78.1 per cent of China's urban household waste treatment capacity by November 2025. That was 19.2% points higher than at the end of 2020.
What happened to China’s old waste mountains
The move towards modern treatment can also be seen in what is happening to former landfill sites.
Xinhua reports that more than 80% of Chinese cities had completed the remediation of ageing waste mountains by 2025.Shenzhen provides a notable example. The city's former Yulong landfill operated from 1983 to 1997 and contained 2.55 million cubic metres of waste. The site was later capped, but urban development eventually surrounded the landfill with high-rise buildings.In 2024, China began its largest landfill excavation project at the site.
About 6,000 tonnes of waste are excavated each day. Light combustible materials, including plastic and rubber, are sent to nearby incinerators for power generation.Once the work is complete, the former landfill is expected to provide about 300,000 square metres for a digital industry cluster and an ecological green valley.According to Xinhua, China's waste treatment sector is expected to move further towards resource recovery during the 2026–2030 period. For visitors to Fushan, that transition can now be seen from 120 metres above the ground. What was once simply a chimney has become a viewing tower over a working waste facility, offering a unique perspective on one of the less visible parts of urban life.
