TIANJIN, April 10 (Xinhua) -- On a recent weekend morning, a resident surnamed Wang walked to a waist-high grey bin in her housing compound in the China-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City, scanned a QR code and dropped in her sorted waste, which seconds later was sucked through underground pipes to a central collection station without any smell, spillage, or visible garbage trucks.

The bin is linked to China's largest city-level pneumatic waste-collection system of its kind. Sorted waste travels through sealed underground pipes under negative pressure, before being compressed at a central station and then sent to a treatment plant. Part of it is used to produce renewable fuel, while part is sorted again and recycled.

According to the eco-city, kitchen waste now achieves a 100-percent utilization rate, while household waste is fully treated in a harmless manner.

Such routines are part of the everyday functioning of a city built in the name of ecology. When construction began in 2008, the site was a barren stretch of saline-alkali wasteland along the Bohai Sea.

China and Singapore then launched what was described as the world's first intergovernmental eco-city project, intended to explore an urban development path that could address climate change, conserve resources and energy, protect the environment, and sustain growth.

As global warming intensifies and extreme weather becomes more frequent, climate change has become not only a scientific issue but also a matter of governance. Over the past 18 years, the Tianjin eco-city has sought to translate that broad agenda into something more concrete, creating a framework that can be measured, implemented and tracked.

Before construction began, Chinese and Singaporean planners jointly developed an eco-city indicator system covering 22 regulatory indicators and four guiding ones, according to Miao Nan, an official with the environmental bureau of the China-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City management committee. The system covers environmental health, resource conservation, economic vitality and social harmony.

The standards were set high. All buildings were required to meet green-building standards, with green buildings accounting for 100 percent of the total. The share of renewable energy use was set at no less than 20 percent.

"The indicator system gave the city a clear framework for tracking its green development," Miao said.

To meet those targets, the eco-city has added more than 12 million square meters of greenery, and its green coverage now exceeds 50 percent. Residents are within a five-minute walk of one of the more than 40 urban parks. In 2020, the indicator system was upgraded to guide the city toward a higher standard of green and low-carbon development.

That same year, China pledged to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060. For cities, the practical problem is how to ensure that ecological conservation, energy saving, emissions reduction and economic development reinforce rather than constrain one another. The eco-city's answer has been to try to make green the more economical choice.

In 2024, the eco-city signed a long-term bulk-purchase agreement with a wind farm in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and a local State Grid company, allowing users to access clean electricity at group-purchase prices. Major users, including the FAW-Toyota new energy plant and the National Maritime Museum of China, now use 100 percent green electricity.

At FAW-Toyota's plant, solar panels have been installed on the roofs of workshops and parking areas. Company staff said all of the photovoltaic power generated there is connected to the grid. Through a combination of green-power purchases and self-generated solar power, the plant saves about 9.7 million yuan (about 1.4 million U.S. dollars) a year in electricity costs and cuts carbon emissions by about 25,000 tonnes annually.

The eco-city is also striving to translate climate action into economic terms. In 2021, China began work on gross ecosystem product, or GEP, as part of efforts to make the value of ecological goods and services more measurable. In 2024, the eco-city's GEP topped 11.1 billion yuan, about 21 times the level recorded at the start of construction.

In 2024, China's National Development and Reform Commission issued an implementation plan for building the eco-city into a national green-development demonstration zone between 2024 and 2035. According to Huang Yonghao, head of the eco-city's development and reform bureau, the plan incorporated GEP into the project's top-level design, making it a key indicator of green development alongside GDP. The aim, he said, is to raise both.

Last September, at the 11th meeting of the Singapore-Tianjin Economic and Trade Council in Tianjin, Singapore's Minister for National Development Chee Hong Tat said the eco-city's upgrade to a national green-development demonstration zone had attracted new Singaporean firms and universities to participate in research, technology transfer, and the development of green and smart industries.

The results of this long-running experiment are also visible in daily life. From 2023 to 2025, summer temperatures within the eco-city were consistently lower than those in some surrounding areas, creating what local planners describe as an "inverse heat-island effect."

That relative coolness is partly a matter of design. The city has six parallel blue-green corridors that combine landscape, environmental and leisure functions. Their alignment follows prevailing winds, allowing fresh air from outside the city to move through more directly.

For residents, the effect is tangible. On a cool morning, Li Xinyun, a 29-year-old resident, ran through a city park less than 300 meters from her home, passing newly leafed trees, grass and pink-and-white blossoms. "This is a city that makes you want to take a deep breath," she said.

Green buildings are another part of the story. By the end of 2025, the eco-city had launched more than 500 green-building projects. All met green-building standards, and 93 percent reached China's two-star green-building standard or above, making the area one of the country's most concentrated clusters of high-grade green buildings.

Green buildings are designed to save resources, protect the environment and reduce pollution throughout their life cycle. China uses a three-star rating system for green buildings, with three stars being the top grade.

At this year's "two sessions," China's national legislature adopted the Ecological and Environmental Code, which for the first time includes a standalone section on green and low-carbon development. It also approved the 15th Five-Year Plan, which sets a target of cutting carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by 17 percent from the 2025 level during the 2026-2030 period.

Li Long, director of the eco-city's management committee, said the code and the new five-year plan provide an important policy framework for green and low-carbon development. Backed by the strengths of China-Singapore cooperation, he said, the eco-city will continue exploring ways to improve development quality, quality of life and governance efficiency. ■