China needs to reduce the consumption of resources and energy and control environmental pollution in its industrialization, said President Xu Kuangdi of Chinese Academy of Engineering here Wednesday at the 2004 World Engineers' Convention (WEC).

He said that China retires 4 million refrigerators and 5 million TV sets annually. The recovering rate of discarded electric household appliances and computers is above 80%, but the methods of treatment remain primitive, like manual disassembling and burning. "The circular utilization of electric garbage is a new challenge for us," noted Xu.

China's per capita major mineral resources, except coal, is less than the average amount in the world, with oil at only 8% of the world average, aluminum 10%, copper 26%, and iron 45%, said Xu.

Half way through industrialization, China is facing severe challenges in resources, energy, and environment. China has to take a new road to industrialization featuring high technological content, good economic returns, low resources consumption, less environmental pollution and a full display of advantages in human resources. To reduce the use of resources and energy and to control environmental pollution constitute the central part of China's industrialization, Xu said.

China has made remarkable progress but still lags behind developed countries in engineering, Xu noted.

"4R (reduce, reuse, recycle, and remanufacture) should be the direction for the development of engineering and science and technology in the new century," said Xu, adding to vigorously promote 4R is an inevitable choice to achieve sustainable development. The final objective in pursuing 4R is to realize a circular economy -- to use the least resources to meet the needs of social and economic development, and to fully explore the value of waste resources by means of saving, recovering, and reusing so as to generate new economic and social benefits.

He said, in the "Tenth Five-year Plan for Energy Saving and Comprehensive Utilization of Resources" formulated by the Chinese government, it is an important objective to achieve the recovering, separating, and treatment of renewable resources, which including rubber, waste plastics, discarded electric household appliances and computers, and used batteries.