Logics and Paths for Legalizing Waste Treatment Facilities in China

These years, social disputes arise from waste treatment facilities frequently, and legalizing waste treatment facilities is the final way for resolving disputes. This paper intends to put forward paths for legalizing Chinese waste treatment facilities from the perspective of regulating waste treatment facilities and standardizing lawsuits. First of all, licensing rules on setup of waste treatment facilities are clarified based on standardized classification of waste treatment facilities. Licensing requirements cover technical standards, assessment of environmental impacts, setup personnel’s capabilities and key passive requirements. Meanwhile, surrounding residents’ consent shall not be deemed as a key licensing requirement for legislation. In addition, it is necessary to strengthen regulation of operational processes, establish regular governmental censorship mechanisms and improve information disclosure systems. Raising Questions: Legal Research on Standardization of Waste Treatment Facilities Over the past four decades, general improvements of urbanization and residents’ living standards in China have contributed to a dramatic increase in domestic wastes. As a consequence, an enormous amount of domestic wastes are produced. Under this situation, numerous waste treatment facilities must be set up and operated. Although domestic waste treatment facilities are indispensable infrastructures for urban lives, there have been considerable conflicts and disputes against construction and operation of waste treatment facilities over more than ten years owing to “externality” of waste treatment facilities; moreover, severe violent phenomena such as highway obstruction and people’s conflicts with the police. In the meantime, lawsuits about waste treatment facilities have unceasingly sprung up, and many legal difficulties have been encountered. Study on waste treatment facilities were mostly empirical generalized studies. For instance, waste classification and different types of waste treatment facilities were investigated from the perspective of environmental sociology. [1] Moreover, related issues about domestic waste treatment facilities such as site selection[2] and decision-making processes[3] were studied from the perspective of legal policy-making or environmental sociology. The deficiencies of previous studies are as follows: These studies placed too much emphasis upon management and governance of waste treatment facilities. Instead, they didn’t systematically demonstrate standardized governance of waste treatment facilities. This paper focuses on how to standardize setup, construction and operation of domestic waste treatment facilities by laws. Status Quo and Legislation of Chinese Domestic Waste Treatment Facilities Status Quo of Facility Construction According to the “13th Five-year Plan for National Urban Domestic Waste Decontamination Facilities, domestic waste decontamination capacity is expected to be increased by 509,700t/day and 67% all over China.[4] This means that domestic waste treatment facilities will be increased or expanded in large quantities in the period of the “13th Five-year Plan”. At present, industrialization of biochemical waste treatment is a little backward in China, where waste treatment facilities are mainly constructed with investments of governmental sanitation departments. The construction of these facilities is primarily supported by governments’ public finance, whereas there are still problems such as lack of diverse investment mechanisms, inadequate social participation, limited market-oriented operations, and lack of large-scale specialized enterprises for waste treatment. International Conference on Advanced Education, Management and Humanities (AEMH 2019) Copyright © 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 352