Recycled plastics refers to the chemical raw materials obtained after processing by physical or chemical methods such as pre-treatment, melting granulation and modification of waste recycled plastics, which is the reuse of plastics. Through the recycling of resources, environmental protection and energy saving can also be achieved. And recycled plastics are as widely used as ordinary plastics, and downstream applications involve textile, packaging, building materials, automobiles, medical treatment, electronics and other fields. Therefore, in recent years, in addition to various policies for degradable plastics, recycled plastics have also been encouraged and promoted by national policies.

Repeated recycling, so that waste recycling

In September 2021, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment issued the "14th Five-Year Plan" plastic pollution control action Plan, one of the main tasks is to accelerate the standardized recycling and disposal of plastic waste, Including strengthening the standard recycling and transportation of plastic waste, establishing and improving the collection and disposal system of rural plastic waste, increasing the recycling and utilization of plastic waste, and improving the level of harmless disposal of plastic waste. Then in November 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "Fourteenth Five-Year Plan for Industrial Green Development", which mentioned the implementation of plastic pollution control requirements, the implementation of comprehensive utilization of waste plastics industry standard conditions, encourage the chemical recycling of waste plastics, and promote the thermal cracking of low-value waste plastics.

At present, China has formed a certain scale of recycled plastics industry cluster area, from the distribution of enterprises, recycled plastics enterprises are mainly distributed in the southeast coastal areas, central China and so on. Specific from the distribution of provinces and cities, the number of recycled plastics enterprises in Jiangsu, Shandong, Guangdong, Anhui and Zhejiang ranks in the top five.

The "China recycled Plastics Industry Development Report 2020 ~ 2021" issued by the Recycled Plastics Branch of the China Materials Recycling Association pointed out that with China's economic development and the improvement of living consumption level, the consumption of plastics continues to grow. In addition, with the changes in people's consumption patterns in recent years and the rapid development of emerging fields, as well as the large increase in demand for disposable medical and protective supplies caused by the new coronavirus pneumonia epidemic, the use of disposable plastic products has also grown rapidly. In 2020, 90,877,000 tons of plastic will be used in China, an increase of 12.2 percent over the previous year. In 2021, about 62 million tons of plastic waste will be produced in China, of which about 15.4 million tons will be buried, accounting for about 25%; Incineration volume is about 27.6 million tons, accounting for about 44 percent, and recycling volume is about 19 million tons, accounting for about 31 percent.

Thanks to rising prices and increasing recycling volume, the output value of waste plastic recycling in China in 2021 will be about 105 billion yuan, an increase of 33% over 2020 (79 billion yuan). At the same time, the output of recycled plastics in China is about 16.5 million tons, an increase of about 2.73 million tons, or 19.8%, compared with 13.77 million tons in 2020. At present, recycled plastics are widely used in textiles, automobiles, packaging, consumer electronics, agriculture, building materials and other fields. Recycled general plastics are the most widely used in film and injection molding fields, accounting for 36% and 28% respectively. Hollow, pipe applications accounted for 12%, and recycled engineering plastics in textile, automotive, packaging, consumer electronics and other applications continue to improve.

For the prospects of recycled plastics, the Chinese Academy of Sciences Technical Institute of physics and chemistry researcher, engineering and ecological plastics National engineering research Center director Ji Junhui said that plastic waste can be recycled should be recycled, including physical regeneration and chemical regeneration, which is both the full use of resources, but also an important way to low-carbon plastics industry. "Recycled plastics have been highly valued in academia and policy, and the state has also laid out research projects to promote it, but the development of the actual industry is not very rapid." Ji Junhui said that with the deepening of recycling and resource research, new recycling technologies with good benefits will appear, and the recycled plastics industry may develop rapidly.

The recycled plastics industry is quietly changing in recent years. In the past, companies entered the field of recycled plastics for the purpose of reducing production costs. As China's environmental requirements become increasingly stringent, some companies have begun to cut into this track for environmental requirements, or out of their own environmental responsibility and commitment. "The transformation of enterprises from simply using recycled plastics to investing in recycled plastics enterprises is a transformation that only appears after 2020." Wang Wang, executive vice president of the Plastic recycling branch of the China Synthetic Resin Association, said.

China's leading plastic raw materials enterprise - Dawn Group has recently carried out layout in both directions of degradable plastics and recycled plastics. Dawn Group marketing minister Xu Gang told reporters that the biggest advantage of recycled plastics is that the price is relatively cheap, according to different needs to be able to produce corresponding products, so as not to let the loss of resources. "Plastic is made of petroleum refining products, Dawn Group planning recycled plastic project is for 'reusable' considerations, recycling recycled plastics can effectively save oil resources." Xu Gang said.

Xu Gang told reporters that in the past 10 years, various countries and regions represented by the European Union have further introduced more policies and regulations, limiting the use of non-degradable plastics through local bans, restrictions and other measures to guide the public to reduce reliance on plastic products. Most of these regulations prohibit the use of disposable plastic products at the consumer end of the regulations, and one of the more far-reaching impact is the EU introduced in 2020 will levy a tax of 800 euros per ton of disposable plastic packaging in 2021 and 2021 directly ban/limit dozens of disposable plastic products of the regulations. The two regulations are aimed at the upstream and downstream respectively, which is enough to shake the pattern of both supply and demand of the industry.

Recycling is difficult, economies of scale are difficult to achieve

Despite the entrance of large enterprises such as Dawn and Golden Hair, the recycled plastics industry has not made a qualitative leap. The overall level of development of the industry is still low - although the market size has been expanding, the core of production capacity is still small, non-standard enterprises. According to Wang Wang, the overall scale of recycled plastics in China is currently large, with an annual output of more than 30 million tons. However, there are only five or six hundred standardized production enterprises, and the output of these standardized enterprises accounts for less than half, while the rest are produced by non-standard small enterprises.

"The biggest challenge facing recycled plastics is that the market is small, chaotic, miscellaneous, there is low-quality competition, Dawn into the recycling market is also hoping to make high-quality applications of recycled plastics through their own efforts, and make some contributions to the progress of the industry." Xu Gang said that the recycled plastics industry needs to be more widely recognized by the public, with the continuous improvement of public awareness of environmental protection, the status of recycled plastics will continue to improve. Xu Gang also pointed out that the recycled plastics industry also urgently needs to develop a more complete industrial chain, from waste recycling to cleaning and processing to downstream reuse, must be large-scale operation, to eliminate "scattered poor", no quality assurance, small scale and product instability of the enterprise situation.

"No one will look at such a complex, so non-standard, to pay such a high investment cost and operating costs of the factory. People would think that the profitability is too poor and the possibility of investment is very low." Wang Wang admitted that the current recycled plastics industry is an industry with complex front-end processing, high cost of recycling process and low profit of finished products.

In the front-end treatment, recycled plastics to waste plastics as raw materials, however, due to the lack of a set of effective waste plastics recycling system, China's waste plastics recycling can only rely on manpower. "Scavengers pick up bit by bit from various places" is the most mainstream channel for recycling waste plastics. And this in the context of industry 4.0, it is really unimaginable.

On the problem of waste plastic recycling, a number of industry experts have called for attention. For example, during this year's two sessions, Feng Shouhua, a member of the CPPCC National Committee and academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, pointed out that recycling is one of the important ways to solve the problem of plastic pollution. The biggest problem is that the plastic recycling system is still not perfect, and the urban recycling infrastructure is generally imperfect, especially the lack of special sorting centers for recyclables."

China Materials Recycling Association recycled Plastics Branch Secretary Wang Yonggang also said that the construction of the sorting center is a key part of the front-end collection. Although China has garbage removal facilities with sanitation systems, it lacks dedicated collection facilities and networks for recyclables, including transfer stations, packaging stations and sorting centers for recyclables.

The amount of waste plastic that can be recycled is also very limited. Wang Wang told reporters that most of the recycling of waste plastics is very small, can not form a process process, it is difficult to achieve industrial scale production. Among the waste plastics, only several specific varieties such as PET and HDPE are expected to achieve industrial development, because these products are hard in texture, large in dosage, convenient for recycling, and also widely used downstream. In this reality, the cost of high-quality recycled plastics will be higher than the price of new materials, because the waste available for the production of high-quality recycled plastics is scarce, which will lead to high prices of high-quality recycled plastics.

"Waste plastic is not produced, but is' discarded 'out. The amount of waste plastic in each city is generally fixed." Wang Wang took the bumper of a car as an example to explain to reporters, "If the amount of bumper after dismantling in a provincial city is 50 tons per day, then the largest factory in the city only needs to have a production capacity of 50 tons per day. Translated into a year, the production capacity is only a little more than 10,000 tons, but also dispersed to many large and small processing plants, it is very difficult to scale."

Collected waste plastic will be sent to the treatment plant, where the waste plastic is sorted and processed. This requires the front-end treatment plant to have a very strong sorting ability, with a series of sorting equipment such as static motors, color sorters, etc., in order to form large-scale processing.

"One of the biggest factors restricting the development of recycled plastics industry is the problem of profitability." Wang Wang pointed out that the recycling costs, reverse logistics costs and manual picking costs of the recycled plastics industry are superimposed on each other, which is far greater than the value of the waste materials themselves. The behavior of enterprises is driven by the market economy, and the recycled plastics industry is struggling to lose its economy.

Strengthen planning, expect the policy to be more effective

Wang Wang believes that China is in urgent need of an environmental economic policy. According to the requirements of the law of market economy, the use of various economic means to regulate or influence the behavior of market players, "a waste that may obviously affect the environment is given a certain value, so that it can generate recycling flow." For example, "mandatory recycling", "minimum recycling ratio of packaging", "proportional use of recycled plastics", "deposit system" and other environmental economic policies.

Specifically, it is necessary to give the market the corresponding responsibility, such as through mandatory recycling, deposit system and other means, requiring the recovery rate of all packaging enterprises to reach a certain target amount. At the same time, but also to give waste plastics a higher economic value. "A mineral water bottle may only be three or four cents, if you can give waste plastic bags a value of one or two cents, more people will be willing to pick it up." Wang Wang said that the amount of waste plastic is originally large, but because of the low economy, no one is willing to collect.

For example, paper-based composite packaging is a type of plastic that is very difficult to recycle. The most common paper-based composite packaging is the milk Tetra Pak bag sold on the market, which is a composite material of aluminum foil, paper and plastic, and it is generally believed that the recycling process is to recycle according to the paper class. However, in the actual investigation, it was found that for paper recycling, paper-based composite materials are among the "impurities". "Unless you sneak it in, you don't want it at all." Wang Wang believes that if the packaging can be given a certain value through methods such as "deposit system", the recycling rate will be "skyrocketed". "Originally, the most front-end of the recycled plastics industry is to rely on some scavengers, if there is no economic drive, it is even less likely that someone will do it." Wang Wang concluded.

The problem of improving the economy of the plastic recycling system is the general consensus of the industry. "The most effective way to establish a plastic recycling system is to establish a commercially operational, profitable recycling model for recyclables. This recycling model can use the means of the market to bring capital into the recycling system, and expand the recycling network according to the demand of the market, increasing the recycling rate and the total amount of recycling." Wang Yonggang said. Feng Shouhua, for his part, suggested that local governments should increase land planning for recycling infrastructure such as sorting centers. At the same time, it should consider providing certain financial support or free land policy for recycling enterprises according to the local reality, so as to promote the construction of various local sorting centers.

It is understood that at present, the policy provided by China's recycled plastics industry stops at the discussion of "encouraging development" and tax reduction. According to Wang Wang, these drivers are not enough to get to the heart of the problem. He stressed that through the deposit system, mandatory recycling and other means, enterprises must assume a certain responsibility for recycling, in order to truly make the recycled plastics industry achieve leapfrog development. "Recycled plastics industry from mature norms, or the ideal state of sustainable development, in fact, there is still a very long way to go." Wang Wang said.

Degradation and regeneration, sharing the great responsibility of green development

In general, there are some shortcomings and problems to be solved at present in both degradable plastics and recycled plastics. So in the development of green plastics industry, which of these two main directions is more expected to play a big role?

Talking about the relationship between degradable plastics and recycled plastics, Ji Junhui believes: "Recycled plastics and degradable plastics are two sides of the same coin, and only concerted development can solve plastic pollutionTherefore, there should be no competition between the two, but a proper division of labor."

Ji Junhui said both are important ways to solve plastic pollution. For plastic waste suitable for recycling, recycling should be ensured first. The renewable industry should focus on expanding the resource utilization of low-grade plastic waste, the current recycling rate of plastic waste is about 35%, the future should continue to develop new plastic waste utilization technology, such as the non-separation of plastic waste and other technologies.

And for some dispersed use, the value of a single product is not high, but the cost of recycling and transportation is high, even more than the cost of the product itself, such as plastic foam products, film bag products; Part of the use process is polluted and not allowed to recycle, such as medicine bottles, pesticide bottles; As well as the current recycling technology can not achieve good recycling products, such as paper-plastic composite aluminum-plastic composite products, etc., degradable plastics have unique economic and environmental advantages, need to further expand the high-end application of degradable plastics in these fields.

"Under the background of 'double carbon', recycling of waste plastics through physical methods or chemical methods is the development trend of the future plastics industry." Qu Yixin said. However, recycled plastics, biodegradable plastics and traditional non-biodegradable plastics will coexist for a long period of time due to reasons such as irreplaceability and cost of recycling.

"Both kinds of plastics can play a big role in controlling plastic pollution." Xu said that the results of biodegradable plastics will be faster, and the results of recycled plastics will go through a process. It is understood that at present, Dawn Group has layout in both degradable plastics and recycled plastics. In terms of degradable plastics, at present, Dawn Group PBAT plans a capacity of 60,000 tons/year in the first phase and 60,000 tons/year in the second phase, and is also planning other degradable plastic projects, such as PLA, PGA and so on. In terms of recycled plastics, Dawn Group is starting to build an industrial chain from upstream recycling and disassembly to cleaning and granulation to product processing; The products cover PP, ABS, PS, PET, PA and other categories. "We believe that the future development of the plastic industry will be along the direction of low-carbon environmental protection, along the direction of plastic products can be recycled, can be completely degraded to develop." Xu Gang said.

"With the rise of the global wave of sustainable development and the proposal of China's 'double carbon' goal, the green plastics industry will usher in a broader market space." Said Pang Guanglian, a member of the Standing Committee of the CPC Committee and deputy secretary-general of the China Petroleum and Chemical Industry Federation.