How should rural garbage be treated?

In recent years, with the development of economy, many rural areas have built new houses, tractors and motorcycles have increased, farmers' dining tables have been enriched and clothes have been put on. However, the environmental sanitation there is not satisfactory, and what is worse is that piles of garbage and sewage cross-flow, which not only destroys the surface and pollutes rivers, but also breeds mosquitoes and flies, threatening farmers' health. Farmers urgently demand to control the environment and eradicate chaos.

The problem of rural garbage did not begin today, but has become more and more prominent in recent years. Generally speaking, there are two main reasons why it is difficult to control rural garbage and sewage.

First, public health facilities are not available or seriously inadequate. Since 2000, the process of rural urbanization in China (especially in the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta) has been obviously accelerated, and more and more rural people have gathered in newly-built central villages and small towns, which makes the garbage and sewage scattered in the vast rural areas increasingly concentrated with the population gathering. However, the public facilities such as garbage and sewage treatment in these places either do not exist at all or are seriously inadequate, so the problem of garbage and sewage treatment has become implicit and explicit, resulting in local environmentalization. In 2002, the author visited a well-developed town in Shenzhen and found that although the town was full of buildings and traffic, there were piles of garbage and sewage. The reason is that the economy is developing too fast and the population is increasing sharply, but there is no sewage treatment plant and there are not enough landfills. This town, which ranks among the top 100 in the national comprehensive economic strength, is still so, and the garbage and sewage problems in other towns and villages can be imagined.

Second, although environmental sanitation facilities have been built, they can't really play a role because they emphasize planning and construction and ignore operation and management. For example, after the Three Gorges Project started, some newly-built immigrant towns planned to build garbage and sewage treatment plants, but they stopped because of lack of operating expenses. Why is this happening? Due to the financial inability of local governments to pay operating costs, residents think that they should not pay or are unable to pay. This phenomenon of neglect of management in the transformation exists in many newly-built towns and villages to varying degrees. It is the above two reasons that make garbage and sewage treatment an unbearable burden in rural areas.

How to solve this "persistent problem"? According to my long-term experience in the work of the National Experimental Zone for Sustainable Development of the Ministry of Science and Technology, it is imperative to build this building as soon as possible, manage it well and give full play to the role of these public environmental sanitation facilities. He said that treating garbage and sewage and improving the living environment are the main contents of rural health, which is related to the health of 900 million farmers and is also the proper meaning of new rural construction. "New rural construction" cannot be simply equated with the construction of new villages and towns, but on the other hand, if a well-built new village and town wants to be completely new, it must be people-oriented, solve the problems of garbage and sewage, and let farmers live and work in peace and contentment.

At present, although the current situation of rural garbage and sewage treatment is not optimistic on the whole, it is gratifying that there have been three good trends.

First of all, with the implementation of Scientific Outlook on Development, the leaders of many local governments have become more and more aware of building an environment-friendly society, especially in the construction of new countryside, and they have begun to pay more attention to environmental protection and sanitation in rural areas.

Secondly, more and more farmers realize that the environment directly affects the quality and safety of agricultural products and their competitiveness in the market. Considering their immediate interests, they have raised their awareness of environmental protection and gradually overcome the bad habits of littering and splashing sewage.

Thirdly, it is gratifying that some economically developed areas have begun to invest heavily in controlling environmental pollution caused by early industrialization. For example, Tongxiang City, Zhejiang Province invested more than 300 million yuan, introduced advanced German facilities, and established a waste incineration power plant. The city set up a professional recycling team to collect urban and rural garbage for power generation, and the waste residue after garbage incineration was made into environmentally friendly building materials. This veritable "garbage revolution" not only produced huge economic benefits, but also improved the urban environment, laying a good foundation for expanding the textile industry and developing tourism. There is also Zhengding City, a large agricultural and pastoral county in Hebei Province, which uses the straw that was used for incineration and caused air pollution in the past to raise cattle and pigs; At the same time, advanced equipment was introduced to deodorize the livestock manure brought about by the great development of animal husbandry, made into biological granular fine fertilizer and exported abroad, which initially formed an ecological circular economy model of agriculture, which not only promoted the development of rural economy, but also greatly improved the environmental sanitation conditions in local rural areas. These two typical experiences are worth popularizing.

The orderly treatment of rural garbage and sewage involves a series of problems and contradictions such as economy, culture and traditional habits, which will be a long-term and arduous task. Now that the problem has just been solved, there are still many deep-seated problems to be solved. For example, how to rationally arrange and scientifically plan rural public health facilities? Do some small towns or central villages have mature professional technology for garbage and sewage treatment? How to compensate the operating cost of the built facilities? Villages and towns around the country have different natural conditions, different economic levels and different population sizes. How to build public health facilities according to local conditions? Wait a minute. All this needs the support of government funds at all levels, the co-ordination of relevant departments and the participation of rural residents. I hope that all localities will really pay attention to it in the process of building a new countryside and take action as soon as possible.

In order to effectively change the "dirty, chaotic and poor" situation of rural environment, improve the quality of rural environmental sanitation and the living standards of rural residents, and accelerate the pace of urban-rural integration, the village level is responsible for establishing a team of professional cleaning staff; Responsible for the garbage collection and removal of farmers, enterprises and institutions in the village and the cleaning of public areas.