A Look at China’s Preferred Method of Waste Disposal: Incineration

Sitting inside a glass-encased cockpit, two men fiddle with joysticks controlling giant claws outside. They look like they're playing at a vending machine at a mall, where you try to grasp a stuffed animal. But these are engineers. The claws they're manipulating are as big as houses, and they're sifting through hundreds of tons of garbage thrown away by the world's largest consumer class.

Trash is piling up in China — more than 520,000 tons a day. China's government has concluded the best way to get rid of it is to burn it at incinerators like this one, the Gao'antun incinerator power plant run by the Chaoyang district of Beijing.