Smack bang in the middle of rural Jiangsu Province is the somewhat unlikely locale to find the high-tech application of recycled materials, providing a low-carbon and green industrial chain to some of the biggest names in global manufacturing and retail.
Centre to this revolution is little-known Hongze District of Huai’an in central Jiangsu, to some a fairly unremarkable area, but in fact one doing more than its bit to end the global dependence on petrochemical resources.
Along Nanhai Lu in Hongze is the Jiangsu Peipu Technology Group, a firm which is in some ways a poster child for the development of northern Jiangsu. Transferring their production base from Wujiang in Suzhou to Huai’an in 2020, a second phase of the facility is under construction, in order to meet the demand, not only from big-name overseas customers, but increasing numbers of Chinese producers.
And as we all know, most of those guys have a huge appetite for polyester. With its annual production capacity of 100,000 tonnes of polyester, completely from recycled products, Peipu Tech is delivering to American Eagle, The North Face, Calvin Kline, Levi’s and Walmart.
Realising this are the millions of colourful-plastic-beverage bottles, cleaned and put into custom-made reaction kettles at the start of a series of specialised and meticulous operations. The result is various granular and filamentous industrial raw materials.
Away from the textile industry, the firm’s ultra-fine denier fiber is used in the insulation film of batteries. With each filament 1/100 the width of a human hair, the raw material is being snapped up by customers such as CATL and BYD.
For Wang Zhipeng, Deputy General Manager at Peipu, it’s a win-win for the environment and business. Having previously studied and worked in the USA, Wang believes that there are great market prospects as well as social value for the environmental protection industry.
But Peipu is no flash in the pan in Hongze, where eco-industries are in the ascendant.
The Taihua Green Multifunctional Nylon New Materials Integration Project has a total investment of over ¥12 billion and a total construction area of 1.637 million square metres.
Listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2017, Taihua New Material is mainly engaged in the R&D, production and sales of nylon filament, nylon grey cloth and finished nylon fabric.
Source materials are waste silks, and leftover materials from the production processes for nylon clothing and marine fishing nets, the Yangtze Evening News reports.
Taihu’s ultra-fine, high-strength nylon now meets the needs of specialised industries in China and those of Original Equipment Manufacturers’ social responsibilities as per their end-user brands.
Such compliance expectations can today be a tall order. Savvy production professionals would do well to keep an eye on Hongze as another string to their bow that also speaks volumes as to the kind of high-quality development in the textile and clothing industry going on in the middle of nowhere in Jiangsu.
