Like their peers in many other parts of North China, generations of farmers in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region once used a simple method to dispose of straw stalks β they simply set them on fire on the farmland.
With his home area shrouded in heavy smoke, visibility on the local highway was sometimes no more than yards, said Gao, who runs Kunpeng, a dairy cattle co-operative. A lot of agricultural waste and animal dung is transformed into biomass fuel, a clean, renewable energy source.
While the smoke that blocked out the sky has gone, an industry chain has come into being, with many farmers making stable incomes by collecting straw stalks.
According to a survey of pollution sources in the region published in , more than While promoting traditional approaches to the disposal of straw stalks, such as digging them into the soil as organic fertiliser or compressing them to produce animal fodder, places such as Bayannuur have tapped into the potential of waste material as a source of biomass fuel. Since becoming operational on May 8, , the project has not only helped improve the environment and mitigate climate change, but also provided financial benefits for local farmers.
Li Huaiqing, general manager of Hanglong Biomass Power Generation, the company that runs the project, said that in addition to generating about million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, the project supplies , metric tons of industrial steam and provides heating for more than 16 million square feet of housing. This results in the use of standard coal being reduced by 95, metric tons and lowers carbon dioxide emissions by roughly , metric tons every year, he added.
