SHENZHEN plans to build a new waste-to-energy power plant on its eastern outskirts that can incinerate one-third of the waste generated by the city’s 20 million inhabitants each year.

    The Shenzhen East Waste-to-Energy Plant will be the world’s largest garbage incineration power plant, Danish firms Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects and Gottlieb Paludan Architects, which have won a competition to design the plant, told U.K.-based Dezeen, the world’s most influential architecture, interiors and design magazine.

    Proposed for the mountainous region in Longgang District, the plant is expected to incinerate 5,000 tons of residential rubbish per day.

    A spokesman for the Energy Environmental Protection Co. Ltd. under Shenzhen Energy Group, Mai Jingcheng, confirmed the project during a phone interview yesterday, without giving more details.

    According to the architects, the facility will “utilize the most advanced technology in waste incineration and power generation.”

    The huge circular building will boast a 66,000-square-meter roof, two-thirds of which will be covered with solar panels, allowing the building to generate its own sustainable supply of energy.

    It will also feature a series of visitor facilities, including a looping walkway that offers a behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of the plant, before leading up to a rooftop viewing platform.

    “The project firstly aims to provide a clean, simple and modern technical facility to deal with the city’s growing waste,” explained architect Chris Hardie, head of Schmidt Hammer Lassen’s Shanghai office.

    “At the same time it aims to educate visitors to this growing waste challenge by taking them on an elevated walkway tour of the plant that ends with a 1.5-kilometer panoramic view of both the surrounding mountains and the 66,000-square-meter roofscape that will be geared to producing actual renewable energy,” he told Dezeen.

    The circular structure will encompass the entire plant, including auxiliary buildings — the aim was to keep the facility as compact as possible.

    The entrance will be a snaking ramp that starts from a landscaped park and winds up between a pair of smokestacks.

    The plant, which is scheduled to be operational by 2020, is one of the three new waste power plants that Shenzhen plans to build in five years to ease a garbage handling capacity shortage, according to a plan made public by the city’s urban management authorities in July last year.

    The other two will be in Nanshan and Bao’an districts.

    By 2020, Shenzhen residents will produce an estimated 16,700 tons of waste each day while existing power plants can only handle 7,125 tons.

    Upon completion, the three new plants will be able to dispose of 10,300 tons of rubbish each day.

    (SD News)