Yin said a viable way out was to use non-grain raw materials --especially wheat or rice stalks. China produces 700 million tons of wheat stalks each year, compared to only five million tons of grain crops.

Under traditional farming, when people were less aware of recycling and clean energy, farmers would normally let stalks rot away in the fields or simply set a fire for a quick cleanup. More than 500 million tons of stalks were estimated to have been wasted each year.

State Energy Bureau chief Zhang Guobao has said in the year's national legislature meeting in March that China should learn from past experiences and put new energy development onto "an important strategic position."

An increasing number of rural households have learned to recycle stalks by adding them to livestock manure into methane pools for power generation. By the end of 2008, some 30 million households have built their own methane pools with an aggregated yearly methane output of 12 billion cubic meters, equivalent to 17million standard coal.

Another 67 stalk power plants were built as of June 2008, transmitting 2.613 billion kilowatt hours into the national power grid.

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Editor:Yang Jie