In Depth | From the ‘open burning of domestic rubbish’ exposure to see the rural waste management
Why is rural waste always ‘nowhere to go’?
Examining the root causes through the lens of Yuanling
In recent years, issues related to improper rural waste management have frequently made headlines. In July 2025, the People's Daily exposed the disorderly dumping of rural waste in parts of Changzhi, Shanxi Province, which was polluting the surrounding environment; in May 2025, two-thirds of the caves in Cili County, Hunan Province, were illegally dumped with household waste; In June 2024, CCTV's Financial Channel exposed the ‘garbage pits’ in rural areas of Weinan City, Shaanxi Province; and the open-air burning incident in Qijiaping Town further highlighted that rural garbage management is far from being on the right track, with its underlying causes and challenges warranting in-depth exploration and resolution.
Taking Yuanling County, where this incident occurred, as an example: it is located in the northwestern part of Hunan Province, at the northern end of Huaihua City, with a total area of 5,832 square kilometres, comprising 21 townships, and a permanent population of 489,500 (as of 2024), over half of whom are rural residents. The county's only operational domestic waste landfill currently handles an average daily volume of approximately 200 tonnes, bearing the disposal pressure from multiple townships.
The project team's research found that due to Yuanling County's mountainous terrain and poor transportation infrastructure, it had long relied on a ‘on-site incineration + rudimentary facilities’ model for rural domestic waste management in previous years. As a result, the county government allocated special funds for the construction of garbage pits and small incinerators. The 2016 government work report of Yuanling County specifically noted that ‘14 garbage incinerators and 1,767 garbage pits were constructed, with a rural garbage disposal rate of 82%.’
However, since 2019, with increasingly stringent environmental regulations, the county government has completely banned the open burning of household waste and instead required each town to resolve the issue of waste disposal on its own.
The reality is far more complex than the written documents suggest. A staff member from the county government admitted, "The 17 towns closer to the county seat (within a 4-hour transport time) have switched to transporting household waste to the county landfill for disposal; several other townships have devised their own solutions—for example, Wuxiangxi Township transports waste to Taoyuan County for incineration (transportation time approximately 1 hour), one township has built its own small-scale incineration facility, while Qijiaping Township has selected a mountain peak for “temporary incineration”."
A government staff member from Qijiaping Town told us: ‘The transportation distance from Qijiaping Town to the county landfill is 127 kilometres. Due to road conditions, the one-way transportation time exceeds four hours, meaning a round trip takes an entire day.’ Although the local government urgently switched to transporting waste to the Taoyuan County incineration plant after the video was exposed, the distance from the town to the plant is still 89 kilometres, and the costs and transportation capacity remain under significant pressure.
The situation in Yuanling is not unique. Vast rural areas backed by mountainous regions, with scattered villages and low population density, are universally facing multiple pressures, including increasing waste generation, extremely complex transportation routes, and unstable facility operations. While governance requirements are increasing year by year, system support lags far behind, resulting in no unified solution to the question of ‘where to put the waste after the ban on open burning.’
From ‘burning’ to ‘transporting’
Compliance is the first threshold for rural waste management
Recently, the topic of ‘China's rubbish is not enough to burn’ has triggered heated debate, and many views have been interpreted from the utilisation rate of incineration facilities in cities, trends in waste reduction, and policy adjustments. However, while the public focuses on waste reduction in urban areas, rural areas are still at the ‘compliance stage’ of waste disposal.
The open burning incident in Yuanling, Hunan Province is not an isolated case, and the problem of ‘compliance difficulties’ in rural rubbish management is recurring in many areas.
In 2023, the Liaoning Jinzhou Municipal Housing and Urban Renewal Bureau responded to the Second Session of the 15th CPPCC Municipal Committee's ‘Suggestions on Enhancing the City's Rural Waste Terminal Treatment Capacity’ (No. 73), noting that: the average distance of some townships from the waste treatment terminal is more than 30-50 kilometres, and that the excessively long transport distances are seriously constraining the overall advancement of rural rubbish management.
Environmental protection inspectors have found that in some counties (districts) of Ningxia Guyuan City, there are phenomena such as random dumping and indiscriminate piling of household rubbish in the urban periphery, channels, and some open spaces or washes in rural townships. Part of the region's rubbish and even directly dumped in the river slopes, and direct contact with the water body; some places dumped for a long time, the number of larger, long delayed not clear, the formation of long-term pollution.
Behind these problems, there are not only poor infrastructure, transport conditions and other practical difficulties, but also the ‘institutional inertia’ left by the early management model.
A government worker in Wuqiangxi Township, Yuanling County, said frankly: "After the county requested a complete ban on open burning of household rubbish, I wanted to remove all the rubbish ponds and incinerators that were built in the early days, but I thought it was too wasteful. Although the government has subsequently conducted a lot of anti-burning propaganda and established a collection and transportation system, there are still residents who habitually light fires in the rubbish pools."
A similar situation occurred in Cili County, Hunan Province. According to Xinhua, ‘Some local cadres also admitted that before 2015, at the village and countryside levels, there existed a variety of ways to dispose of rubbish, such as centralised incineration, landfill, and discarding towards the dissolving caves.’Despite strengthened governance in recent years, the inertial path of historical disposal methods continues to make compliance switching difficult.
It can be said that from ‘tolerating non-compliance’ to ‘insisting on compliance’ is the most basic and difficult step in rural waste management. To take this step, can not only rely on the ‘ban’, but also need to continue to invest in infrastructure, make up for the short board of transport and transfer, but also through training and publicity, to change the grass-roots government and the villagers' cognitive and behavioural habits.
Cracking the transfer difficulties
How can rural waste management in Yuanling be changed?
Currently, Yuanling County requires rural rubbish to be handled according to the model of ‘household sorting, group cleaning, village collection, township transfer, and county treatment’ [8]. However, the project team combined the research and found that the main obstacle encountered in this model is the ‘town transfer’ link - the transfer cost is too high, the operation chain is too long, and the supporting facilities are insufficient, which has become a ‘choke point’ in the current governance system. It has become a ‘choke point’ in the current governance system.
On this basis, the project team suggests that the township government can start from the following two aspects to reduce the pressure of transfer and improve the operational efficiency of the system:
Firstly, promote the separation of wet and dry rubbish in rural areas, reducing the quantity is to reduce the cost, and the rural areas have a natural advantage: a high proportion of food waste, and the conditions for on-site treatment. The vast majority of food waste can be digested in situ through composting and family farming. If the wet and dry waste are separated at the source, not only can waste reduction be achieved, thus reducing the amount of waste that needs to be centrally transferred and lowering transfer costs; at the same time, dry waste does not contain leachate in the transport process, and the requirement for the airtightness of the transport vehicle can be lowered to a certain extent, thus reducing the cost of equipment and operation. Compared with the common four classifications in the city, the model of wet and dry waste separation is simple and easy to understand, and it is easy to realise for the rural residents with low operation difficulty , which can be a feasible path for the current rural waste reduction.
Secondly, townships are rationally planning the construction of rubbish transfer stations and improving the level of organisation of transfer. At present, the rubbish in some townships still relies on village-level pools to store and wait for vehicles to collect and transport the rubbish, which is very easy to be burned or piled up due to delays. We suggest that the townships set up a rubbish transfer station in a coordinated manner, centralise the domestic rubbish of each administrative village, and then equip large rubbish trucks with compression function for unified secondary transfer. On the one hand, it can effectively reduce the frequency of transport and improve the utilisation of resources; on the other hand, it can promote the ‘daily cleaning’ of rural rubbish, eliminating the risk of pollution from its temporary accumulation in rubbish ponds or incineration.
Difficulty in collection and transport, lack of management and weak facilities
Rural rubbish management can not only rely on exposure
With the frequent exposure of rural rubbish disposal violations, the standardised treatment of rural rubbish is receiving more and more public attention. Open burning incidents like the seven Yuanling Aping, exposed not only environmental pollution problems, but also reflected the construction of rural rubbish management system of multiple short boards: weak awareness of the government management, the end of the treatment facilities are insufficient, the responsibility of the mechanism is not clear and other issues intertwined coexist.
Behind the surface of the rubbish problem is the systemic challenge of the governance system. Compared with the city, the rural areas in the transport radius, population density, financial investment and other aspects of the greater pressure, relying only on a one-time exposure is difficult to fundamentally solve. To truly promote rural waste management into the normative track, must form the government, sanitation enterprises and the public three-way synergistic systematic mechanism.
Yuanling County is not an isolated case. In our research, we saw that many townships are also facing the same ‘collection is not timely, transport is not out, nowhere to deal with’ predicament, behind the governance capacity and the mismatch of resource ratios. The social concern brought by this incident should be an opportunity to promote the improvement of the system and the inclination of resources.
We hope that this research is not only a record, but also a recommendation. We look forward to more on-site attention and discussion, to really see and clarify the rural waste management problem, and to contribute to the construction of a fairer, more efficient and more sustainable waste management system.
Source:https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/oT_eLY6gICrs679bWDiR3g