After a ban on "foreign garbage" in China for nearly a year, it was reported that at the recent World Trade Organization (WTO) Import Licensing Committee meeting, five WTO members, including the United States, Canada and Australia, called on China to increase restrictions on waste imports. transparency. In this regard, Professor Du Huanzheng, director of the Institute of Circular Economy of Tongji University, said in an exclusive interview with the Science and Technology Daily on the 25th that as a manufacturing power, China's import of solid waste is to solve the supply of raw materials, and environmental protection must be the "standard."
Raise the threshold of imports and keep dirty parts out of the country
According to reports, since the 1970s and 1980s, China began to import solid waste that can be used as raw materials, as a supplement to insufficient resources. According to the data provided by the former Ministry of Environmental Protection, the scale of China's “foreign garbage†imports expanded rapidly after the 1990s, from more than 4.5 million tons per year in the 1990s to 45 million tons per year in 2016.
Professor Jiang Jianguo from the Institute of Environmental Solid Waste Control of Tsinghua University also said that China's own huge amount of garbage production has brought extremely difficult difficulty in safe disposal, and the entry of "foreign garbage" is even worse. For example, e-waste contains more than 1,000 different components, which will release a large amount of toxic and harmful substances; even carrying colorless and odorless radioactive pollutants, it is not easy to detect, and the harmless treatment is more difficult than other pollutants.
"At present, the manufacturing industry is still the core driving force for China's economic development, and it needs to be vigorously developed and upgraded. Therefore, in order to ensure the supply of raw materials, solid waste that can be used as raw materials is still needed." But Du Huanzheng also stressed that it is necessary to "improve the import threshold." "A good is allowed to come in, and resolutely keep dirty, poor, poisonous and harmful outside the country."
Resource recycling enterprises are mostly "scattering pollution"
China's resource recycling industry still has problems such as low technical level and small scale. Jiang Jianguo said that many enterprises that use imported waste as raw materials for recycling resources processing and utilization are “scattering and pollution†enterprises, and their pollution control capacity is low. Most of them do not even have pollution control facilities. The pollution discharge during processing and utilization seriously damages the local ecological environment. Imported waste mainly relies on manual sorting and manual dismantling. The toxic and harmful substances such as viruses and bacteria carried by the virus may directly infect the employees.
"Therefore, China needs to raise the threshold of the resource recycling industry and increase the access conditions. For example, enterprises must have a certain scale, enter the circular industrial park for centralized management, and ensure environmental protection standards." Du Huanzheng said that the resource recycling industry cannot be "one size fits all". To be "killed" is a small, heavily polluted workshop. "In fact, there are many large-scale and standardized large-scale enterprises or listed companies such as Yingke and Guangdong Blonde. They reuse waste plastics, and they are not only environmentally friendly, but also produce high-end products and increase added value. â€
Improve import policies based on economic and environmental cost accounting
Du Huanzheng believes that the import of solid waste that can be used as raw materials faces the two dimensions of environmental protection and resources. "From the current situation, if you do not import waste plastics, you must import oil; if you do not import scrap steel, you must import iron ore. Which one is imported, the environmental cost will be higher? For example, importing scrap steel and using iron ore Shilai produces steel for comparison, accounts for its economic and environmental costs, evaluates one by one, and then perfects our import policy based on the evaluation conclusions."
China is also raising the standard for the import of solid waste that can be used as raw materials. The former Ministry of Environmental Protection and the State Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine jointly issued 11 national environmental protection standards such as “Environmental Control Standard for Importing Solid Wastes as Raw Materials – Smelting Slagâ€. The new standard adjusts the inclusion index of non-hazardous waste in imported waste, and adjusts the general inclusion control index of the waste non-ferrous metal standard to 1%; considering the quality of waste, such as the content of recyclable metal in imported waste hardware. It is increased from 60% to 80% of the total weight of waste hardware.
"In fact, after several rounds of revisions, China's import waste management policy is relatively complete and strict." According to industry insiders, there are many management departments related to "foreign waste" in China, such as environment, development, business and customs. There is also a need to establish a good coordination mechanism between departments to ensure a win-win situation for the economy and the environment.
Editor in charge: Cao
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