YANTIAN District’s efforts in reducing and classifying household waste have been recognized by the United Nations Human Settlements Program (U.N.-Habitat) and listed as an excellent case of a “Smart Waste Reduction City.”

The district is the only county-level district in China to receive this recognition, Shenzhen Special Zone Daily reported yesterday.

The “Smart Waste Reduction City” project, initiated by the U.N.-Habitat Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific in China, aims to introduce China’s practices in garbage classification and reduction and showcase its sustainable development solutions through the U.N. platform, the Daily report said.

Yantian has implemented a comprehensive smart system for waste classification and utilized technologies such as the Internet of Things, big data and artificial intelligence to manage the whole kitchen waste treatment process from households to treatment centers. The system can greatly reduce overall management costs and can trace garbage sources, thus highly improving garbage classification rate.

The district’s waste recycling rate has exceeded 50%, while the separation rate of kitchen waste has exceeded 26%. The figures surpass the standards set by national and municipal authorities, demonstrating significant achievements in waste reduction.

At the Yunding Tianhai housing compound for example, authorities can learn about the time, behavior and electricity consumption of community residents through a carbon management and monitoring platform. Based on the data, authorities can provide residents guidelines on how to optimize electricity use and practice low-carbon lifestyles.

As one of the country’s first low-carbon pilot cities, Shenzhen is committed to higher-quality and more sustainable green development with less energy consumption and lower pollution emissions.

Yu Jing, deputy director of the Shenzhen Municipal Development and Reform Commission, said that Shenzhen is seizing major opportunities for green and low-carbon development, integrating green and low-carbon concepts into all fields and processes of urban development.

The city’s GDP reached 3.24 trillion yuan (US$449.93 billion) in 2022. The installed capacity of clean energies such as nuclear and gas has reached 78.3%, and energy consumption and carbon emissions per unit of GDP have dropped to one-third and one-fifth of the national average.

In 2022, the added value of Shenzhen’s green and low-carbon industry reached 173 billion yuan, up 16.1% year on year, of which intelligent networked vehicles increased by 46.1% year on year, and new energy increased by 16.1%.

In the field of transportation, Shenzhen is the first in the country to replace all public transportation like buses and cabs with electric vehicles. The number of electric vehicles in logistics and distribution has reached 100,000 units.

(Yang Jie, Han Ximin)