Highest Waste-to-Energy (WtE) energy production (country)

According to a 2019 report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), China has the greatest energy capacity deriving from waste. In 2017, it had an installed capacity to produce 7.3 gigawatts (GW), or 7.3 billion Watts, of electricity from 100 million tonnes (110 million US tons) of solid waste across its 300-plus waste-to-energy (WtE) facilities. The WtE industry in China had grown on average by 1 GW per year over the previous five years; 1 GW is comparable to the capacity if a nuclear reactor, which is enough to power around 1 million homes for one hour.

According to the same report, not surprisingly China also has the most WtE plants of any country, with 339 as of 2017. It was projected that would have increased to 400 by the year 2020, and the central government had a goal of disposing of almost one-third of all the country's trash via these plants by 2030.

The current largest WtE plant in Asia is the Lujiashan MSW incineration plant in Beijing, China, with a daily processing rate of 3,000 tonnes (1.1 million tonnes per annum). Another WtE facility being built by Babcock and Wilcox Volund in Shenzhen, China - scheduled to be completed by 2021 - has a proposed daily processing capacity of 5,000 tonnes (1.8 million tonnes per annum), which would make it the largest WtE plant in the world by capacity.