What a load of rubbish... the vast tip full up 25 years early
THE largest rubbish dump in China is already full – 25 years ahead of schedule.
Every day, 10,000 tons of waste is being dropped off at the Jiangcungou landfill – the size of 100 football pitches – in the city of Xi’an instead of the 2,500 tons expected.
More waste is being dumped at the site than anywhere else in China, which is one of the world’s biggest polluters.
The site, in the Shaanxi Province, is earmarked to become an ecological park in the future as a series of incineration plants are being developed in the country.
One was opened earlier this month and a further four are planned to be operational by next year.They will process as much as 12,750 tons of rubbish a day under a national plan to curb landfill.
The Jiangcungou landfill, first built in 1994, accepts waste from eight million of the country’s 1.4 billion population as Xi’an is one of the few Chinese cities which encourages landfill.
It had been designed to be operational until 2044.
China has had problems dealing with the rubbish it generates and in 2017 stopped importing it from overseas.
The Xi’an dump covers an area of around 878,000 square yards at a depth of 500 feet at the site. It has the storage capacity of more than 44 million cubic yards.
MOST people have never heard of the actress Nicola Wren. But drop into the conversation that she’s the younger sister of Chris Martin and ears prick up. And that, she says, has been both a blessing and a curse.
Nicola grew up with her brothers and sister in a tiny village called Whitestone four miles west of Exeter. At 42, the Coldplay frontman is the eldest followed by architect Alexander, 40, nurse Rosanna, 37, and Richard, 33, who’s in the army.
At 29, Nicola is the baby of the family. And she found her calling several years before her brother became a global music superstar.
“At six, I began appearing in village pantomimes,” she says. “I’ll never forget playing a bunny rabbit. My siblings clapped. My fate was sealed.
“As the youngest – and an afterthought, to boot – my childhood was dominated by wanting to win the affection and attention of my brothers and sister.”
Nicola had early encouragement in her ambition from Chris’s girlfriend, later his “consciously uncoupled” wife, Gwyneth Paltrow.
When the Oscar-winning actress started dating her brother, Nicola had never heard of her.
“I was 11 and couldn’t have cared less,” she says. “I was much too busy preparing for my role as Mole in the village production of Wind In The Willows.
“She and Chris came to see a performance so you can imagine the impact of that on the audience. She was so pretty, so warm, so nice to me. I absolutely adored her.
“I had mostly been surrounded by boys all my life. So for this cool young woman to come in and show me attention was like a dream. And she seemed to believe in me.”
Nicola graduated from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 2014 and changed her name from Martin to Wren because another member of actors’ union Equity had the same name.
She appeared in the harrowing BBC drama A Song For Jenny about the 7/7 bombings in London. Since
‘I can’t remember a time when Chris wasn’t making music. He’d write about my gerbils’
then, she’s mostly been writing onewoman shows and appearing at the Edinburgh Fringe, in New York and in London.
Last year, she went to a storytelling evening in Brixton and decided the time was right to come out from behind her big brother’s shadow. “I talked about the time I hitchhiked home from a Coldplay concert because I’d missed my lift,” she says. No doubt her brother was relaxing in a record company limo.
“It seemed to go down well so I made up my mind to write Superstar in which I play myself.”
The show, all about coming to terms with who you are when there’s a celebrity in the family, was a sell-out in Edinburgh and opens at London’s Southwark Playhouse on November 26.
The challenge, of course, has been to avoid the accusation that she’s riding Chris’s rainbow. When Nicola was born, Chris was 13.
“I can’t remember a time when he wasn’t making music,” she says. “He’d write songs about anything. Spaghetti. My gerbils. It didn’t matter.”
She was eight when Chris put Coldplay together and the band took off almost immediately. “Everybody believed in his talent and drive,” she says. “But we were from a village in Devon and that sort of thing doesn’t happen from places like that.”
AND Chris himself? Did he have any idea of what lay ahead? The way I’d describe it is that he had an almost naïve self-belief. There was no question of failure; no fear, either. He just went for it.
“That’s what the play’s about. Chris took my measure of success off the scale. And then Gwyneth came into the family and it seemed anything was possible.”
The effect of having such a power couple in your midst could unbalance a family.
“But Chris was always just Chris to the rest of us,” says Nicola. “Still is.”