The world’s growing middle class and its finite natural resources portend well for the recycling industry’s future, but that does not ease some critical challenges currently facing plastics recyclers in China.
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| Ma Hongchang, BIR consultant |
Among presenters at the RePlas 2014 (autumn) even in Shenzhen, China, in November, Ma Hongchang of the Bureau of International Recycling (BIR) had some of the most encouraging comments.
Ma, a Beijing-based consultant on Chinese affairs for the Brussels-based BIR, said recycling is being driven both by resource scarcity and governmental mandates. The European Union (EU) has set a goal of recycling 60 percent of its municipal solid waste by 2030, noted Ma, while its current rate may be as low as 25 percent.
The private sector has likewise made commitments to recycling, with Ma mentioning the goal of Wal-Mart to incorporate some 1.4 million tons of plastic scrap in the making of its packaging materials by the year 2020.
China has imported as much as 8.8 million metric tons of plastic scrap annually, though government regulations of a different sort have reduced that number by 11 percent, down to about 7.9 million metric tons, said Ma.
The regulations standing in the way are both on the EU side in terms of increased documentation and in China, where regulators are often under pressure to reject plastic scrap loads as unwanted “foreign” waste.
Another presenter, Wang Wenguan of the Shenzhen Polymer Industry Association, noted that the word “plastic” itself has such negative environmental connotations to people in China that his association changed its name to substitute the word “polymer” for the words plastics and rubber. “The word ‘polymer’ gets more government support,” Wang quipped.
Despite the bad press plastics sometimes receives in China, Wang added that Shenzhen is the corporate home of a growing number of plastics-related companies. “Shenzhen is a leading city in the biopolymer industry,” he added.
The RePlas 2014 (autumn) event, organized by the China Scrap Plastics Association (CSPA), was Nov. 6-7 at the Coli Hotel in Shenzhen, China.