ABSTRACT
‘The City Besieged by Waste’, Wang Jiuliang’s 2011 documentary about the countless illegal garbage dumps surrounding Beijing, puts the problems that the disposal of MSW causes the city of Beijing, and by extension the rest of urban(ized) China, into a stark spotlight. The country faces the enormous task of preventing the urban areas and countryside alike from being buried in waste in the years to come. Solving the MSW problem would benefit the Chinese environment, the health of its people, and ultimately the rest of the world as well. In the preceding chapters, I have looked at a number of aspects of waste management that play a role in this important but extremely complicated question. I have also presented the views of a number of the participants in this process, all of whom need to be brought on board to find a possible solution.
