Therefore, perhaps the most striking part of Xiong"an"s "zero-waste" experiment is not that the city has learned how to make garbage disappear. Instead, the experiment is about making the city"s metabolism visible in a different way: Waste becomes energy, ash becomes building material, an industrial facility becomes public green space and infrastructure once associated with pollution becomes part of a neighborhood.

　　For a world searching for greener forms of urbanization, that transformation may be the more important story hidden beneath the park.