1. Daily removal of domestic garbage. Taiyuan City now adopts direct clearance and transfer station clearance. Direct removal (i.e., first-level transfer) involves removal trucks collecting garbage at about 700 garbage stations throughout the city and transporting it directly to the landfill. The transfer station model (i.e. secondary transfer) first sends the garbage to the transfer station, and then uses containers and mechanized operation to send the garbage to the landfill. Since the secondary transfer garbage is not exposed or thrown away, the "Goddess scattering flowers" style garbage transportation method will gradually be replaced. At present, there are two domestic waste compression transfer station projects in Taiyuan City, Shele and Nanyan, each with a processing capacity of 600 tons/day. An additional 100 small waste transfer stations will be built to achieve orderly removal of urban waste.
2. Dispose of garbage by landfill. Due to various factors such as funding, processing capacity, technical requirements, and waste composition, Taiyuan City currently mainly uses sanitary landfill to handle domestic waste. Most landfills choose deep ditches, with no springs around them and deep underground water levels. They are also equipped with facilities such as substrates, exhaust, and leachate collection. They implement layered landfills, filling a layer of garbage with a layer of loess on top. And so on, layer by layer. The garbage collected from various garbage stations and transfer stations across the city is eventually sent to landfills for landfill disposal.
Taiyuan City currently has three domestic waste sanitary landfills: Shanzhuangtou, Shele and Xingou.
Among them, Shanzhuangtou and Shele have been closed. The Dongshan Xingou Landfill Plant absorbs 400 to 500 trucks of garbage every day, with a total volume of more than 2,000 tons. Its capacity is now close to saturation.
3. Special waste incineration. In response to various medical wastes, Taiyuan City established a special waste incineration plant with a daily processing capacity of 100 tons/day in 1995. So far, 96 medical units with more than 50 beds have signed collection and incineration agreements with special waste incineration teams, accounting for 75% of the total. About 45 tons of medical waste are recycled and incinerated every day. The city generates about 15,000 tons of medical waste every year, of which about 7,000 tons are incinerated. The failure to achieve all incineration treatment is not due to lack of capability, but to management issues. There are still 25% of the city's medical units (including hospitals in suburban counties) and more than 1,000 individual clinics and foreign-related hotels that have not been included in centralized management. Special garbage refers to toxic and bacterial garbage, mainly produced in hospitals, clinics, foreign-related hotels, etc. Special garbage must be stored in an airtight manner, collected and transported in a unified manner, incinerated in a centralized manner, and treated harmlessly. However, due to a shortage of funds, two of the four special garbage removal trucks of the incineration team of the Taiyuan Municipal Environmental Sanitation Bureau have reached the end of their life. The incinerator should be repaired once every year and once every three years. Due to the single-furnace operation, it has been running continuously for 4 years without major repairs. Once a malfunction occurs and the furnace is shut down, the consequences will be very serious. The "Taiyuan City City Appearance and Environmental Sanitation Management Measures" adopted in 2000 clearly stipulates that toxic and hazardous waste generated by medical and other units should be disposed of in accordance with relevant national regulations, or professional units should be entrusted to collect and process it uniformly. It is strictly prohibited to burn, bury, transport outside or mix it with other garbage and dump it without authorization. Anyone who burns, buries, transports outside or dumps toxic and hazardous waste without authorization in violation of regulations will be fined not less than 1,000 yuan but not more than 10,000 yuan. The current situation still requires strengthening management, using local laws and regulations to standardize the rights and responsibilities of special waste producers and processors, and completely prevent secondary pollution of medical waste from harming society.
Dahuaigou Garbage Dump, Xinghualing District, Taiyuan City-Dongjianhe Village, Zhongjianhe Township