China has developed an ‘action plan’ to boost its solid waste treatment capacity in the next five years, aiming to utilize 4.5 billion tonnes of solid waste and recycle 510 million tonnes by 2030.
Drafted by 25 government departments, including the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the plan sets out measures to address the impacts of solid waste on public health and workplace safety.
“Solid waste should not be viewed as trash, but as valuable resources that are currently mismanaged,” said Zhou Haibing, deputy head of the NDRC.
The ‘action plan’ aims to reduce waste at the source, then improve its management and recovery. This includes extracting the recyclable components from domestic and industrial waste products (plastics, metals, glass, etc.).
Manufacturers will be further encouraged to scale up their use of recycled materials, including plastics, metals and paper pulp, through institutional frameworks and market mechanisms.
To accommodate China’s ‘major’ agricultural sector, the plan will promote the use of fully biodegradable plastic mulch films and target an improved recycling rate for pesticide packaging, among other measures.
Policy incentives will apparently be enhanced, and support will be introduced to encourage diverse stakeholders to invest in the agricultural solid waste recycling sector – a move hoped to increase the technical capacity of the relevant businesses.
Resources for existing funding channels will also be pooled to help develop qualified resource recycling projects, and research and development will increase for solid waste recycling technologies.
Other measures include standardizing transportation and storage processes and boosting the capacity for safe disposal.
The plan will extend to solid waste like smelting slag, construction debris, and crop straw, which will apparently be directly reused or integrated into new components.
The Chinese government intends to fast-track the development of a long-term, comprehensive framework to build sustainability-minded commercial frameworks, direct the market towards a circular economy, and achieve more comprehensive waste governance.
Last year, Packaging Europe published a specialist report focusing on the sustainable packaging landscape in China, featuring commentary from leading Chinese companies. The discussions covered China’s five-year Plastic Pollution Control Action Plan, which urges various sectors to replace their plastic packaging with alternative materials; and the “dual-carbon” approach of peaking the country’s carbon emissions by 2030, then targeting carbon neutrality by 2060.
In other news, Germany has transposed the EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation into national law – raising recycling quotas for various materials and revising licensing and financing rules. New targets include a 95% recycling rate for aluminium and ferrous metals, and a 75% minimum for plastics – 70% of which must be mechanically recycled.
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