Recycling sustainability of waste paper industry in Beijing City: An analysis based on value chain and GIS model

Highlights

• Index of recycling sustainability for assessing waste paper recycling.

• Integrating methodology of GIS and value chain model.

• Historical changes of informal recyclables distribution sites in Beijing.

• Value chain of waste paper recycling in Beijing may face challenges in the future.

• Policy implications to improve waste paper recycling in Beijing.

Abstract

China established a self-organized and market-driven recycling system, which was dominated by the informal sectors. In recent years, the amount of domestically-recycled waste paper grew slower than expectation in China, which may be resulted from a decline in economic sustainability of current recycling system. For understanding the waste paper recycling system in most cities in China, the economic mechanism remains unclear and the city-level data is extremely insufficient. In this work, an index of recycling sustainability (IRS, benefit divided by cost) is analyzed with a resolution of 1 km² grid in Beijing City, by adopting value chain and GIS methodology. Five degrees of IRS are defined, from high-degree (IRS > 1.10) to low-degree (IRS < 0.95). Different stakeholders in the informal waste paper recycling system were interviewed to fill the data gap. Results show that: (1) from 2015 to 2018, the informal recycling of waste paper accounted for approximate 80% in Beijing; (2) the number of informal recyclables distribution sites decreased from 27 to 11, and their average distance to the city-center rose from 27.5 km to 40.9 km; (3) in 2015 and 2018, the grids with high-degree IRS accounted for 99.5% and 89.2%, respectively, indicating a sustainable waste paper recycling industry in Beijing; and (4) according to the scenario analysis, if the operating cost rises by 30%, the grids with low-degree IRS accounts for 98.5%, indicating a nontrivial challenges when the recycling cost keeps increasing in the future. Policy recommendations are put forward for a more sustainable paper waste recycling system in China.

Introduction

There is a large amount of paper products consumed by the modern society, resulting in enormous paper waste all around the world. Although recycling technologies of waste paper were well-developed due to their advantages of energy & material saving and pollution reduction, comparing to primary paper production (Wang et al., 2012, Bajpai, 2014), a large amount of waste paper was disposed as municipal solid waste (MSW). According to the report by World Bank, total amount of global MSW generated in 2016 was 2.01 billion tons, while the quantity of paper waste accounted for 17%, about 340 million tons per year (Kaza et al., 2018). There are global-, regional- and national- scale studies concerning about waste paper recycling. Van Ewijk et al. (2018) firstly estimated the recovery potential of waste flows in the global paper life cycle, revealing that the recycled input ratio can increase from 38% to 67–73% in an ideal scenario. The European Paper Recycling Council (2018) estimated that 72.3% of paper waste had been recycled in 2017 in Europe. In the Directive 2008/98/EC, EU emphasized to use “recovery potential” as the target for the classification, collection, and recycling of household solid waste (European Parliament, 2008). The recycling rate of waste paper in Japan was around 80% in 2018, according to Japanese Waste Paper Recycling Promotion Center (2019). China led the world in the amount of recycled waste paper during the last ten years, 57.74 million tons of paper pulp were produced from waste paper in China in 2018, in which 8.76 million tons were imported from the developed countries such as the US and Japan (China Paper Associtation, 2019).

In China, the informal sector played an important role for recycling paper waste. Individual waste pickers and small private companies collected and traded paper waste for pursuing profits from the recycling market (Kashyap and Visvanathan, 2014, Souza Lima and Mancini, 2017, Tong and Tao, 2016, Wilson et al., 2006). Steuer et al. (2017) investigated the recycling industry in Beijing and found that the informal recycling system was still the main contributor to MSW recycling. In recent years, the collecting and transporting cost of waste paper, also known as the reverse logistics cost, kept increasing due to the sharply rise of land rent, labor, and fossil fuel prices, thus bringing great challenges to waste paper recycling industry (Steuer et al., 2017, Zhou and Zhou, 2015). As a result, domestic paper waste recycling rate in China was only 47% in 2017 and its growth rate dropped from 20% in 2005 to −13% in 2017, which was much slower than expectation (China Paper Associtation, 2019). Meanwhile, the waste paper recycling industry in China imposed to the challenge due to the new Waste Import Ban, i.e., the unsorted waste paper was not allowed to be imported to China since 2018 (Tan et al., 2018). According to the latest statistics, the amount of pulp produced by imported waste paper decreased by around 30% in 2018, throwing great impact on the global waste paper recycling stream (Qu et al., 2019). Developed countries need to find new target countries or strengthen domestic capacity to dispose their paper waste, on the other hand, China’s paper industry will be more dependent on its domestic recycling. To promote domestically waste recycling, China has been put unprecedented efforts on the source separation of MSW. According to the plan of Chinese government, all of the prefecture-level cities should implement a MSW source separation system and promote material recycling by the end of 2025. Performance of MSW source separation is set as a key indicator for evaluating achievements of local government, while a large sum of financial fund has been invested to promote MSW source separation.

Economic sustainability assessment of recyclables, e.g., waste paper, is fundamental for designing incentive policies, promoting source separation, and establishing a sustainable MSW management system (Wang et al., 2015). Value chain model (VCM) has been widely applied for assessing the economic sustainability of waste recycling. Mueller (2005) applied VCM to examine the cardboard recycling in Durban, South Africa, by constructing analyzing model involving informal sectors and other stakeholders. It showed that local policies should support the cardboard collectors due to the value they created. Pati et al. (2008) established a model for analyzing the reverse logistics distribution networks of paper recycling in India and examined the cost reduction effect in such networks. Fei et al. (2016) applied VCM for analyzing the formal and informal recycling systems in Suzhou city. Pishvaee et al. (2010) used VCM to illustrate plastic recycling in Northern Europe, indicating that the main obstacle was the collecting and transporting costs. Beretta et al. (2017) discussed the environmental impacts in different stages of the food value chain in Switzerland and found that 60% of the total climate impacts was caused in the end of food value chain. Geographic factors are vital to determine the economic sustainability of recycling, such as waste generation density, transport distance, and logistic structure, etc. in different urban areas. For instance, spatial layout of sorting and recycling sites is one of the key factors to affect the transport cost of waste paper recycling. Previous VCM studies generally viewed the city as a “black box”, the geographic factors inside the city were rarely discussed. Geographic information system (GIS) was adopted for analyzing waste recycling and MSW management. López Alvarez et al. (2008) applied GIS tool to optimize the waste paper and cardboard collection process for small businesses. Based on GIS analysis on population density and territorial, 59% of the shops, which generate 82% of the waste paper, were selected to cover recycling services, thus improving the recycling efficiency and obtaining high quality paper waste. Karadimas and Loumos (2008) established a GIS-based model to estimate the amount of MSW generation and estimate of the optimal number of waste bins and their allocation. Rada et al. (2013) used a Web-GIS tool to improve MSW management system in Italy and China. Nevertheless, very few of those GIS-based researches discussed how spatial distribution of recycling facilities influences the economic sustainability of waste paper recycling.

This work aims at revealing the economic mechanism and filling the data gap in waste paper recycling for mega cities. A methodology integrated VCM and GIS is developed to examine the value flows along with the waste paper recycling stream in Beijing city. Multiple stakeholders were investigated to obtain data from both formal and informal recycling sectors. Recycling sustainability of waste paper is analyzed with a resolution of 1 km² grid in 2015 and 2018, the recycling cost and benefit, as well as the index of recycling sustainability (IRS) of waste paper in each grid is estimated herein. Scenarios concerning the increase of recycling cost are analyzed, to examine the possible changes in the future. Based on the results, policy recommendations are put forward for promoting a more sustainable paper waste recycling system.