The new regulations announced by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) during third week of December will go into effect starting 2016.
BEIJING : The new regulations announced by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) during third week of December will go into effect starting 2016. The regulations are likely to impact the operations of country’s struggling plastic recycling industry. The government intends to remove smaller, less efficient and less sustainable facilities, paving the way for consolidation of larger players.
According to the new regulations, recyclers need to adhere to certain minimum standards with respect to their operating location, processing capacity, energy consumption, safety and quality. The sites must have to qualify the inspection by Ministry officials conducted at periodic intervals. Recyclers are required to have sufficient processing areas to match their processing capacities.
Existing PET recyclers must have to meet a minimum operating capacity of 20,000 tons. However, for new PET bottle recyclers, the minimum processing capacity is set higher at 30,000 tons. Incidentally, PET recyclers are considered as Category-1 recyclers.
Existing Category-2 recyclers that comprises of companies that deal with sorting, cleaning and shredding of plastic scrap are required to possess processing capacity of not less than 20,000 tons. Also, new players will be issued license only if they have minimum processing capacity of 30,000 tons.
The processing capacity of new Category-3 recyclers that includes companies that extrude reprocessed pellets must be a minimum of 5,000 tons. Existing players with at least 3,000 tons processing capacity will be allowed to continue operation.
Furthermore, all categories of recyclers must ensure that electricity consumption for operations is restricted to less than 500 kilowatts per ton of waste plastics. Also, water consumption levels by Category-1 and Category-2 recyclers are restricted to less than 1.5 metric tons per ton of waste plastics. The maximum allowed water consumption level for Category-3 recyclers is set at 0.2 metric tons.
Website: www.scrapmonster.com
