Beijing produces 18,000 tons of waste every day - Photo credit: David Barrie via Flickr

Beijing has deployed more than 100 water cannons filled with liquid deodorant to blast away the stench of rotting rubbish on the crowded Chinese capital’s streets.
The deodorant cannons, officially named “high pressure long-range deodorant spray”, were invented at the Gao’antun Garbage Landfill Plant, a rubbish dump in one of Beijing’s suburbs that was recently forced to apologise for the horrid stench coming from its land.

The smell of rubbish, so powerful that it keeps people from opening their windows, will be soon eliminated thanks to a chemical reaction with the plant-extract-based compound, explained the inventors. Once the biological compound has neutralized the smell, the fragrance-covered rubbish is then buried under odor eating covering sheets and more deodorant is sprayed on top, for good measure, BBC explained.

Deodorant cannons represent the ultimate effort to eliminate rubbish’s smell from capital’s streets, especially as the warmer weather causes more garbage to decompose. So far, however, the Chinese’s fight against waste isn’t convincing anyone, say those who lives near the garbage dump: “Whenever the bad smell comes we are all coughing. At night we all wake up coughing,” resident Geng Haiou told Reuters.

“Beijing’s trash problem needs more recycling, not deodorant guns,” wrote Gina-Marie Cheeseman on Triplepundit. And she may be right – according to official figures, the 17 million capital inhabitants generate 18,000 tons of waste every day, 7,000 more than the municipal disposal plants could store. Less than 4 percent of Beijing’s trash is recycled, as the greatest amount of capital’s waste is instead dumped in more of 200 legal or illegal landfill sites.

Last year, photographer Wang Jiuliang created a map of all the Beijing landfill sites using GPS and Google Map. “People are forced to use these places for dumps and landfills. There is no better place,”  he told The Guardian. “China has become a consumer society over the past 10 or 20 years. The authorities are working hard to solve the garbage problem, but it has emerged too quickly.”