On an interesting note I was in China in the Fall of '05. I headed up a trade delegation from the State of Oregon with some Environmental Business folks and an aspiring politician running for State Legislature. The EPA of sorts catered to our group as we were there to team up with an environmental company being run by my father. His connections allowed us to be pampered by the Chinese Government and we were there to help them solve some of their environmental challenges.
Those challenges make ours in the US look like a mole mound next to a volcano. Speaking of volcanoes, while we were visiting with Mayors and Vice Mayors and Governors at an international Trade Show in Xiamen, Fugian in South Eastern China we took an excursion a few hours north to the capitol city Fuzhou. This city had a population that equaled the entire State of Oregon. The EPA put us up in a billion dollar hotel with lavish everything, spent the night and the next morning we all jumped in vans and went to visit the local dump. Quite the contrast. It was about 40 minutes out of town and around 7000 feet above the city on top of a volcano. It seems some years prior an engineer came up with a seemingly brilliant idea to turn the vast volcano into a dump for this massive city's garbage. He even won some kind of award for this wonderful idea.
Well, the days of reckoning finally arrived. Not only had the river below been completely polluted for years and unusable from the leaching of the garbage from the rains draining into the river far below, but the silly thing was nearly full. Our job was to figure out what to do and let them think it was their idea. So we did. Simply shut it down while building a transfer station with a complete recycling facility to handle the waste. Generate electricity for the city from some of the refuse...some one else must have won that award we sure didn't...let alone get paid. But now and again I stop and reflect.. "what if that thing ever erupted? Eeeuuu!"
;)
Links;)
Archives
Wow, that's amazing. It's amazing how short sighted we can be about things like this. Great job.