By Trina Tan
While China’s economic growth may have slowed in recent years, its journey towards circularity shows no sign of losing momentum.
By 2030, the country’s plastics recycling market is forecast to reach 33 million tonnes, with a compound annual growth rate of 6.21 per cent from 2023 to 2030.
This positive outlook is boosted by several plastics recycling investments from both domestic and international players. Many Chinese companies are also looking overseas to source advanced technologies that can help boost their recycling capabilities and capacities.
In June 2024, major Chinese recycling firm Ceville invested $69 million to commence construction of a new plastics recycling facility in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu province, under its local subsidiary Zhenjiang Ceville. The plant includes facilities for waste bottle washing, shredding, pelleting units and PET chemical recycling. It is designed to produce 150,000 tonnes of recycled pellets annually by the start of next year, including 100,000t of mechanically recycled PET pellets and 10,000t of chemically recycled PET pellets.
Ceville is looking to commission the PET chemical recycling unit within the second quarter of 2025, and have other units come online by the third quarter of this year.
Zhenjiang Ceville is the first mainland Chinese recycled polymer producer to receive European Food Safety Authority certification for its post-consumer rPET to be used as food-grade material.
Also last June, Ceville purchased its fifth bottle-to-bottle recycling system from Austrian recycling machinery manufacturer Erema to recycle post-consumer PET waste through another local subsidiary, Jiangsu Ceville New Materials Technology Co. The new machine will be installed at the company’s Dantu site in Jiangsu at the end of the year.
Joint venture in Shantou City
South Korea’s SK Chemicals is in the final stages of opening a plant in Shantou City for the production of 100,000t of chemically recycled raw materials and 200,000t of chemically recycled copolyester and PET. This project is being conducted via a joint venture with China’s Shuye Environmental Technologies, a depolymerisation specialist.
SK acquired a 10 per cent stake in Shuve for $15.53m in 2021, while also securing the rights to purchase 20,000t of chemically recycled polymers from the company.
Two years later, SK Chemicals purchased a chemically recycled raw materials unit from Shuye for about $100.1m. The acquired assets included a depolymerisation plant that decomposes waste plastics to produce recycled raw materials, as well as a PET chemical recycling factory that uses recycled bis(2-hydroxyethyl) terephthalate.
That same year, SK Chemicals signed a memorandum of understanding with Lovere, a major recycling business unit under China’s Shanghai Yuekun Environmental Protection Technology, to jointly develop waste plastics collection and sorting operations in Guangdong province. Lovere operates in 37 Chinese cities and collects and recycles 420,000t of household waste each year.
Effectively, as SK Chemical explained, its investments have completed the chemical recycling value chain for recycled raw materials and PET.
Meanwhile, Beijing Hinergy Qingyuan Technology Co is building a facility in Shandong province to convert 30,000t of mixed waste plastics into recycled polymer feedstock each year. The local company is using technology from US firm Honeywell to achieve this.
Chinese PET manufacturer giant Zhink Group signed a deal with France’s Carbios in June 2024 to build a bio-recycling plant in China, using Carbios’s enzymatic depolymerization technology to process a minimum of 50,000t of prepared PET waste, with potential room for expanded capacity.
While enabling Zhink to achieve its ambitious growth targets and further expand its existing annual domestic PET production capacity of 3m/t with rPET capacities, the contract also opened the door for Carbios to enter the Chinese market.
State-owned recycling group
Perhaps the biggest wave in recent months in the Chinese plastics recycling market was set off by the Chinese government’s announcement, in October 2024, that it had officially launched the China Resources Recycling Group Co (CRRG), a state-owned enterprise with a registered capital of approximately RMB 10 billion ($1.4bn).
Structurally, the state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council, China Baowu Steel Group Corporation, China Petrochemical Corporation, and China Resources (Holdings) Co, each hold 20 per cent of CRRG, while the Aluminium Corporation of China and China Minmetals Corporation both hold 10 per cent.
CRRG has been tasked with building a national platform for resource recovery and utilisation, and recycle various materials, including plastics. According to CRRG chairman Liu Yu, the company will be built into a comprehensive solution provider covering multiple key categories of recycled resources, integrating functions such as warehousing, processing, distribution, trade-in and standard setting. Not only will it engage in “traditional recycling business”, CRRG will “focus on solving the longstanding bottlenecks of renewable resources through technological innovation and application expansion”.
It is understood that CRRG is currently setting up a number of specialised subsidiaries simultaneously, covering the building of offline resource recycling networks, trade-in business, scrap steel recycling, recycling of durable consumer goods such as electronic products, recycling used batteries from new-energy vehicles and electric bicycles, recycling decommissioned wind power and photovoltaic equipment, recycling scrap non-ferrous metals, and recycling and processing of plastics waste.
China’s 14th Five Year Plan set a RMB 5 trillion ($681bn) target in output value from its recycling industry by this year, as well as a target of 450m/t in recycling volume of major renewable resources, and a 60 per cent utilisation of domestic waste. It’s an ambitious target, but one it expects to make.
Recycling in China: figures
The volume of waste plastics recycled in China in 2023 was 19 million tonnes, a 5.6 per cent (1m/t) increase compared with 2022, according to the Recycled Plastics Branch of the China Material Recycling Association. This included 6.3m/t of waste PET, 4m/t of waste PE, and 3.9m/t of waste PP – accounting for 33 per cent, 21 per cent and 21 per cent of the overall amount respectively.
The recycling value of waste plastics dropped by 1.9 per cent over the previous year, however, to RMB 103 billion ($14bn).
In 2023, the domestic production of recycled plastics was approximately 16m/t, an increase of 500,000t, or 3.2 per cent, compared with 15.5m/t in 2022.
Overall, the National Bureau of Statistics reported that the plastics products industry in China had a total output of 74.885m/t in 2023, a 3 per cent increase over the previous year. Although the production volume was a drop from 2021’s 80m/t in 2021, China’s global share grew slightly, to 17.4 per cent.
