(May 26, 1999) A giant ‘tongue’ with a vast rolling track will ‘gobble’ garbage near the dam in an effort to prevent waterborne rubbish from damaging the power generators. The tongue is aboard the world’s biggest sanitation ship, which will start work in July.

A giant “tongue” with a vast rolling track will “gobble” garbage near the Three Gorges Dam and prevent water-borne rubbish from damaging the power generators. The tongue is aboard the world’s biggest sanitation ship that will start work next month, engineers said yesterday. The sanitation ship, the Qing Piao Yi Hao, or No. 1 Cleanup, is equipped with huge garbage collection equipment designed by a city shipbuilding institute. It was built at Jiujiang port in Jiangxi Province. The vessel will mainly be used to clean up Yangtze pollution in the Three Gorges Dam area, patrolling within 3 kilometers of the dam. Power generation has not begun. Top capacity will be 300 cubic meters of garbage an hour on or near the surface – six times greater than that of the world’s second biggest sanitation ship, a Japanese-owned vessel that consumes 50 cubic meters an hour. Reports have said nearly 10 million tons of waste have accumulated in the Three Gorges Dam area. It includes plastic bags, bottles, dead trees, animal corpses, and other things. Engineers said large amounts of garbage could damage the power generators. If water carrying garbage enters the generators, a build-up of waste could eventually cause malfunctions. “The ship will guarantee the power generators in the dam work at maximum efficiency,” said engineer Gao Xiaojun at the city’s No. 704 Research Institute of the China Shipbuilding Industry Corp. Gao and others worked two years to design the core equipment – an automatic waste collector – to be installed at the bow. “It’s like a huge tongue,” said Gao. The collector “tongue” itself is 13 meters long and 3 meters wide and will “eat” marine rubbish with its rolling track, similar to a gently sloped moving sidewalk. The ship is more than 30 meters long. It has a high-powered water gun to break up large pieces of junk into smaller chunks that will be stored and unloaded.

Shanghai Daily, May 26, 1999