The greenhouse effect

Visitors are drawn to a farm house model at an environmental technology exhibition in Beijing. The house uses 32 new technologies such as a wind turbine that generates electricity. Wu Changqing

Wang Junli's family income doubled six months after they moved into their new house. Today, the 47-year-old lives with his wife and daughter in Guajiayu, a typical mountain village in Pinggu District northeast of Beijing, more than 150 kilometers away from the downtown area.

Here, Wang was able to earn an annual income of 80,000 yuan ($10,500) - not despite the desolate location but rather, because of it.

The fresh air and lovely landscapes surrounding his home serve as the perfect attractions to bring Beijingers from the heart of downtown to the hinterlands of the municipality.

Wang wasn't the only one who made such a move. His neighborhood is a collection of 71 two-story, energy-efficient houses that residents moved into last October. And nearly all of these households were able to boost their incomes by entertaining city dwellers, serving them meals of country cooking and providing accommodation.

Demand has risen for his services, and he sometimes has to send visitors to his neighbors' homes during the golden weeks.

"More and more tourists come to our village on holidays. I even have to recruit temporary waiters to deal with it during the golden weeks," Wang says. In addition to the landscapes and pine-scented air, these newly built houses are also exerting their own appeal.

The 71 new houses in Guajiayu were built using new environmentally friendly methods and include features such as equipment for harnessing solar technology, heat-conservation and geothermal heat.

Instead of being made with the traditional clay bricks, these structures were made from gangue-shale-porous hollow bricks. These bricks, along with an exterior layer of insular lining, keep the rooms cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter relative to outdoor temperatures.

"We used to burn 4 to 5 tons of coal every winter before moving here, which cost us at least 4,000 yuan ($530)," Wang says. Since the relocation, he needs about 1,000 yuan ($130) at most.

In Wang's new house, solar energy is collected by rooftop solar panels and then converted into geothermal heat as it travels through underground pipes beneath the floor.

Wang plants peach trees and feeds the bio-gas furnace with the branches he cuts. Branch-cutting is a technique Wang uses to enable more peaches to grow. The heat generated by burning 4 kilograms of peach branches can boil 96 kilograms of water, which is more effective than burning coal, Wang says.

Farmers at Guajiayu of Pinggu District in Beijing have moved into new houses with environment-friendly features. Li Dejun

Low housing prices and high subsidies from district and town governments make it possible for these villagers to purchase such new houses.

Wang spent 70,000 yuan ($9,200) in cash and borrowed 115,000 yuan ($15,100) for his 200-square-meter new home. So, Wang bought the house for about 860 yuan ($110) per square meter - only one-tenth of the price of houses outside Beijing's Fifth Ring Road.

Beside his new home stands a solar-battery-operated streetlamp - streetlamps here all work with solar-batteries and emit light on both sunny or rainy days because they convert and store electricity.

What satisfied Wang most about his new location are the recycle bins and sewage drainage systems. All household garbage is collected regularly, and sewage is drained and filtered at the same time.

When saying goodbye to traditional clay brick-wood style houses, Guajiayu villagers also said farewell to their past rural lifestyles. Solar heat and street lamps, bio-gas, neat and well-designed community blocks, and a growing tourism service industry, creates a villa-group-like living environment instead of that of a supposedly poor village. "Another 70 houses built in the same style will be finished this October. The rest of the villagers living in old houses will move into their new homes soon," Wang says.

In the country's bid for a sustainable way of development in the countryside, Guajiayu is just one of many villages reconstructed with energy-saving purposes kept in mind.

In Pinggu District, for example, more than 370 households have such new energy-saving properties. The local government plans to build new facilities where their old houses were located, in addition to parks and highways. "It's said that the highway section in Pinggu District will open after it's completed, which will definitely bring more visitors and opportunities to Pinggu," says Wang Shiyou, an official from Rural Construction Department of Pinggu District Construction Committee.

And according to plan, Pinggu is just the beginning. More than 600 households will move in new energy-saving houses in Beijing countryside counties such as Pinggu, Daxing, Tongzhou and Changping, says Wang Junqing, vice-director of Energy-Saving and Building Materials Administrative Office of Beijing Municipal Construction Committee.

Not all new settlers live near landscape areas, such as Meng Zhonghe, a 62-year-old fruit farmer in Taiping Village, of Pinggu District. He has developed other ways to support his family of seven. For example, he has nine big plastic sheds for fruit-planting, each of which will bring him more than 10,000 yuan ($1,321) every harvest season.

"I paid 50,000 yuan ($6,607) in cash and borrowed another 50,000 yuan for the new house," Meng says. Like Guajiayu, villagers in Taiping Village were also provided allowances when buying these new energy-saving houses. Like other villagers, Meng received a 60,000-yuan ($7,928) allowance for both giving up his old house and buying the new one.

The houses of Taiping Village were built using a different brick-laying method than those of Guajiayu. In Taiping, the houses were triple-laid, with two layers of hollow bricks sandwiching an extra layer of insulation.

"It requires about one ton of coal in winter compared to the previous 4- to 5-ton minimum required at our old house," says Meng Zhonghe's 46-year-old neighbor Chen Xiurong.

"Only on the few extremely freezing days do we burn furnace, because it is much warmer now due to the energy-saving construction and solar-underground heating pipe system; usually, it's around 14 to 15 C in normal cold days without furnace," she says.

Meng agrees that the new houses are better.

"The house is close to the new park and has a more convenient drainage system; however, it's a little big and ugly in my mind," he says.

The five rooms spanning 170 square meters seem to not provide enough space for Meng's seven family members. Fortunately, he has another small house near his plastic watermelon shed. Meng's son and daughter-in-law are living there for now.

Meng must repay his 50,000-yuan loan within three years. But he doesn't seem too worried about it. He can earn 10,000 to 15,000 yuan ($1,300-2,000) from each of his nine plastic sheds.

"Someone once wanted a plastic shed for 25,000 yuan ($3,300), and I declined," Meng says.

Through open bidding, all new energy-saving houses in Pinggu District were designed by Beijing Liren Constructive Design Corporation, and all hi-tech bricks were provided by Beijing Jinyang Building Materials Co Ltd. They provided different designs and materials after researching the unique conditions among villages - considering the differences among plains or mountainous areas, for example - upon request from the Municipal Constructive Committee.

(China Daily 07/18/2007 page20)