How to deal with the peak period of home appliance replacement
Recently, the General Office of the National Development and Reform Commission, the General Office of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the General Office of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment jointly issued a notice to determine the responsibility for the 2022 recycling target of Haier, Gree, TCL, Changhong, Midea and Hisense. The declared target recycling volume is 16.96 million units.
At present, my country has entered the peak period for the replacement of household appliances, and the amount of waste household appliances eliminated is increasing at an average annual rate of 20%. This year, the amount of scrapped household appliances is expected to exceed 200 million units.
In the face of the peak of home appliance scrapping, can the home appliance recycling system carry the heavy burden?
How should home appliance manufacturers make efforts?
Home appliance trade-in has great potential
Recently, at a high-tech Wanda Suning Tesco store in Zhengzhou City, Henan Province, English teacher Du Ruru purchased a large 1.5P first-class energy-efficient inverter air conditioner.
The active price of the product is 2499 yuan, and she actually only spent 1999 yuan.
"The air conditioner at home has been used for 15 years, and it is somewhat aging. Taking advantage of the old-for-new activity, it happened to be replaced with a new one." Du Ruru said that she submitted information about the old air conditioner and the intention to buy new home appliances on the "Zheng Haoban" APP. And dismantle and recycle old machines.
When she went to the store to buy a new air conditioner, she directly deducted 500 yuan by paying through the cloud flash payment app.
In March this year, Zhengzhou City launched a home appliance trade-in measure, that is, a subsidy of 20% of the actual transaction price of a single piece of new home appliance, with a maximum subsidy of no more than 500 yuan per unit.
"This has caused the sales of home appliances to heat up rapidly." Ni Zhihua, general manager of Henan Suning.com, said that from March 19 to May 22, Suning.com's major stores in Zhengzhou completed over 15,000 replacements, with a conversion amount of nearly 15,000 units. 54 million yuan.
my country's home appliance market has huge potential for trade-in.
Around 2009, driven by policies such as sending home appliances to the countryside and trade-in for new ones, my country formed a peak of popular consumption of home appliances.
Today, this large wave of household appliances has entered the node of upgrading, and to promote the renewal and consumption of household appliances, it is necessary to smooth the circulation and make up for the shortcomings of the recycling and processing of waste household appliances.
At present, my country's waste home appliance recycling has industry problems such as small recycling scale, unsmooth channels, and repeated private demolition.
The "White Paper on China's Waste Electrical and Electronic Products Recycling and Comprehensive Utilization Industry 2021" released by the China Household Electrical Appliances Research Institute shows that in 2021, the theoretical scrap of the first batch of catalog products in my country will be about 208 million units, including 62.6 million TV sets and refrigerators. 41.622 million units, 35.429 million washing machines, 44.547 million room air conditioners and 24.218 million microcomputers.
According to the processing data and industry research estimates released by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment in the first three quarters of 2021, in 2021, the processing volume of waste electrical and electronic products in my country will be about 87 million units.
The white paper also pointed out that in 2021, the reduction of the subsidy standard of the waste electrical and electronic products disposal fund will have a significant impact on the industry. The reduction of the subsidy standard will directly bring about a decrease in profits, and the indirect impact will be that the problem of private demolition will be more severe.
It is reported that the "Regulations on the Administration of the Recycling and Disposal of Waste Electrical and Electronic Products" (referred to as the "Regulations") stipulates that my country has established a waste electrical and electronic product disposal fund to subsidize the recycling and disposal costs of waste electrical and electronic products. obligation to pay.
From 2012 to 2022, a total of 5 batches of 109 processing enterprises were included in the list of waste electrical and electronic products fund subsidy enterprises, and a total of 25 billion yuan in subsidies was issued. The annual processing capacity of "four machines and one brain" reached 165 million units, and the total amount of recycling and dismantling Nearly 600 million units.
At the 15th International Conference on Extended Responsibility of Electrical and Electronic Products Producers and Recycling Technology held recently, Deng Yi, director of the Policy Research Office of the Comprehensive Business Department of the Solid Waste and Chemicals Management Technology Center of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, said that my country's waste electrical and electronic products The amount of product specification processing has increased year by year, but there is also the problem of the imbalance of fund revenue and expenditure, which has caused business difficulties and hindered the development of the industry.
The next step is to study and improve the design of the fund system, evaluate the effectiveness of the implementation of the fund system, and promote the revision of the Regulations.
Leading enterprise layout recycling industry
In the process of improving the recycling and disposal system of used home appliances, promoting the implementation of the extended producer responsibility system has become an important starting point.
Last year, the National Development and Reform Commission and other three ministries and commissions proposed that, in accordance with the principle of "enterprise voluntariness, government support, demonstration and orderly advancement", home appliance manufacturers should be encouraged to carry out recycling target responsibility system actions, and rely on the product sales and maintenance service network to build the reverse direction of waste home appliances. Recycling system, further optimize recycling channels, smooth the production, circulation, consumption and recycling of household appliances, and promote the high-quality development of the industry.
"Haier should actively undertake corporate social responsibilities and rapidly build a green and low-carbon recycling system." Ren Xianquan, vice president of Haier Smart Home Co., Ltd., said that Haier Smart Home will follow the principle of "first try" to lay out the recycling industry sector, and use waste household appliances Recycling is the starting point, extending to dismantling, recycling, and remanufacturing, and building a recycling industry system of "recycling-dismantling-regeneration-reuse".
In the recycling process, Haier's recycling network has integrated 32,000 offline stores and more than 100 logistics and distribution centers.
In the dismantling process, Haier invested 368 million yuan to build a recycling and dismantling plant in Laixi, Shandong. It is expected that the first phase of the project will be officially put into operation in August this year. After it is put into operation, it will be able to dismantle 2 million sets of waste household appliances and 30,000 tons of modified granulation every year. .
Changhong has established Sichuan Changhong Green Environmental Protection Technology Co., Ltd. in 2010, specializing in the recycling, dismantling, disposal and comprehensive utilization of resources of waste household appliances.
Changhong Green has a recycling and disposal capacity of 2.1 million units of waste household appliances per year, and the recycling area is mainly in Sichuan and Chongqing, which is a reasonable logistics radius.
Based on the quality of the company's dismantling materials, the market forecasted scrap volume and the recycling situation in 2021, Changhong Green has set a target of 650,000 TV sets for recycling in 2022, with a recycling rate target of 20%; and a recycling target of 200,000 air-conditioning products. , the recovery rate target is 24%.
The relevant person in charge of Changhong Holding Group stated that the recycling operation has established a project-level management structure and formed an organizational management form with clear responsibilities, rights and interests.
Sichuan Changhong Central Research Institute and technical departments of various industrial companies provide technical support for recycling operations, from research and development design, product production, product sales, after-sales service, reverse logistics, channel recovery, waste electricity dismantling, comprehensive disposal, resource reuse, etc. The whole ecology of the chain provides information service guarantee, and each link has a corresponding evaluation and assessment mechanism.
At the end of March this year, the "2022 Midea Green Recycling Action" was officially launched.
Midea Group provides users with double discounts of "green recycling + replacement subsidy" for 4 major household appliances, including air conditioners, refrigerators, washing machines, and TV sets, regardless of brands.
"Midea Group is expected to recycle 300,000 waste home appliances through its own recycling channel this year, and a cooperative recycling channel is expected to recycle 100,000 waste home appliances." Yin Sheng, head of Midea Group's green recycling project, said that Midea Group focuses on building an "Internet + recycling" system , refine the recycling target to each month, formulate special assessment requirements for recycling, actively promote the achievement of the targets of each recycling channel, and send all of them to cooperative dismantling enterprises for formal scrapping.
The recycling processing model can be replicated and promoted
According to the relevant policy goals, by 2023, my country will develop a number of demonstration benchmarks for home appliance manufacturers to implement the recycling target responsibility system, and form a batch of replicable and popularized recycling processing models and experience practices, and the standard recycling rate of key home appliance varieties will be significantly improved. .
For home appliance manufacturers, to carry out the recycling target responsibility system action, it is necessary to not only focus on responsibility, but also to calculate the economic account, focus on solving problems such as high recycling cost and difficult operation, and strive to explore practical paths.
"In the past 10 years, Gree Electric's total investment in the field of renewable resource recovery has exceeded 2 billion yuan. Although it has not yet achieved profitability, the environmental benefits it brings are immeasurable." Dong Mingzhu, chairman and president of Gree Electric, said.
By the end of 2020, Zhuhai Gree Green Renewable Resources Co., Ltd. had processed over 34 million sets (sets) of various waste electrical and electronic products, reducing carbon emissions by about 1.7 million tons.
"We must turn waste into treasure, and strive to recycle electronic waste." Chen Hui, director of Changhong Green Electric Waste Division, introduced that only the deep processing and modified materials of household appliance plastic dismantling products, Changhong Green has an annual output of 20,000 yuan. tons of plastic deep processing capacity.
The processing of waste circuit boards to obtain precious metals also forms a source of profit.
Haier is committed to model leadership, focusing on the "1+3" model to promote the industry to create a win-win situation.
"1" means a digital platform for the recycling industry, and "3" means "recycling, treatment, and reuse" as the core sector, and through the platform for recycling companies, dismantling companies, recycled materials research and development companies, and recycled materials utilization companies and other empowerment to solve problems such as the disconnection between product design and manufacturing services and the information chain of decommissioning and recycling, the difficulty in evaluating product carbon footprint and reuse, and the difficulty in implementing the extended producer responsibility system for manufacturing enterprises, and create a new model for the development of the industry-wide circular economy.
In fact, the implementation of the recycling target responsibility system not only drives leading manufacturers to build a product recycling system, but also brings new opportunities for recycling and dismantling companies.
According to Zhuang Guangchun, vice president of Shenzhen Aibo Green Environmental Protection Technology Co., Ltd., as a third-party recycling platform, Aibo Green adopts the "Internet + recycling" model to collect and exchange payments nationwide to achieve a closed loop of "production-collection-demolition". Help manufacturers to achieve annual recycling targets.
"Through the implementation of the recycling target responsibility system, home appliance manufacturers, recycling companies, and dismantling companies should be closely combined to create a complete green supply chain system." Deputy Director of the Electric Appliance Recycling and Green Development Center of China Household Electrical Appliances Research Institute Tian Hui said that the combination of the recycling target responsibility system and the fund system should be explored to provide industry support for the revision of the Regulations and the improvement of the extended producer responsibility system.
In order to effectively cope with the continuous growth of waste electrical and electronic products, upstream and downstream enterprises in the industrial chain should integrate with each other to achieve value enhancement.
The social level should also form a joint force to promote the recycling of waste household appliances.
"It is necessary to combine the extension of producer responsibility with the extension of consumer responsibility, and the extension of producer responsibility system with the city's waste material recycling system," said Du Huanzheng, a professor at Tongji University.
Zhou Lei
Zhou Lei