Beijing, July, 2025 – The 2025 Green Recycled Plastic Supply Chain Forum was grandly held in Beijing, facilitating in-depth discussions on the development pathways for green recycled plastic supply chains. Aeon Song, Deputy General Manager of Hunan Vary Tech Co., Ltd. (Vary Tech), was invited to attend and delivered an insightful presentation as a featured guest in the panel discussion "Dialogue: Five Years of Technological Innovation and Development in the Plastic Circular Economy".
Deputy General Manager Aeon Song elaborated on Vary Tech's "dual-track parallel strategy" of mechanical recycling and chemical recycling, along with its integrated model of technological R&D and operational synergy. He shared the company's experience in establishing a closed-loop system for Post-Consumer Recycled (PCR) plastics from waste household appliances and the industrial-scale operation of its 220,000-ton annual capacity chemical recycling facility for municipal waste plastics. He also analyzed the core challenges, driving factors, and future direction of the plastic recycling industry.
Aeon Song pointed out that the core challenge in waste plastic recycling lies in the feedstock. He detailed the difficulties encountered in running chemical recycling projects: "The technology itself is not the biggest bottleneck." During the industrialization of waste plastic pyrolysis for oil production, Vary Tech invested significant effort in overcoming challenges like sealing and coking. Furthermore, the highly uncontrollable nature of municipal solid waste as a feedstock leads to difficulties in standardizing the outputs of pyrolysis oil and carbon, compelling Vary Tech to make substantial investments in pre-treatment processes to ensure end-product quality. Currently, Vary Tech has developed 12 core technologies for chemical recycling of waste plastics, including combined flexible sealing, continuous feeding/discharging, hot air recycling, efficient quenching and three-phase separation, and heat carrier circulation. The daily processing capacity of a single unit has reached 150 tons.
In the mechanical recycling sector, the complex and varied sources of PCR feedstock result in significant batch-to-batch quality fluctuations and difficulties in controlling impurities and black specks. This not only increases the complexity of compounding but also reinforces the consumer perception that "PCR equals low quality and low price," creating a huge gap in the market for high-quality PCR feedstock. Aeon Song emphasized that the industry's failure to effectively bridge the technological and management gap from "waste" to "standardized, high-quality industrial feedstock" is the fundamental problem. Vary Tech's subsidiary, Wanrong Rili, has developed a proprietary IoT smart platform system for the entire chain, establishing a fully traceable and credible PCR materials system.
On the path to advancing the resource recycling industry, policy guidance and market demand play central driving roles. As Aeon Song of Vary Tech stressed, the resource recycling industry is inherently policy-driven. Whether governments directly pay for environmental benefits or create genuine market demand through policy, policy is crucial.
In recent years, China has significantly strengthened policy support for chemical recycling of waste plastics, providing a solid foundation for industry development. In 2020, the Guangdong Provincial Development and Reform Commission and the Department of Ecology and Environment issued the "Implementation Opinions on Further Strengthening Plastic Pollution Control," pioneering encouragement for chemical recycling technology. In 2021, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE) included chemical recycling for the first time in its "Technical Specifications for Waste Plastic Pollution Control (Draft for Comments)". That same year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) explicitly stated in the "14th Five-Year Plan for Industrial Green Development" the encouragement of chemical recycling of waste plastics and the promotion of technologies like low-value waste plastic pyrolysis. The "14th Five-Year Plan Action Plan for Plastic Pollution Control" and the national standard "Guidelines for Recovery and Recycling of Plastic Waste" further cleared obstacles for chemical recycling technology development.
With global plastic pollution becoming increasingly severe, governments worldwide are intensifying management efforts. The EU, US, China, and others have introduced numerous policies to increase plastic recycling rates and promote the circular economy. For example, the US Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) 2023 draft strategy aims for a 50% plastic recycling rate by 2030.
The United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) further aims, through its resolution on an international "Plastics Treaty," to achieve a legally binding agreement covering the entire lifecycle of plastic products. As a core member of the Chemical Recycling Working Group of the China Petroleum and Chemical Industry Federation (CPCIF), Vary Tech is collaborating with international chemical giants like BASF and Dow to build a "closed-loop chemical recycling" ecosystem, advancing the global development of the chemical recycling industry for waste plastics.
Since 2009, Vary Tech has embarked on a transformation from single-point recycling to a closed-loop, full-industry-chain model, continuously leading the high-value recycling of waste plastics:
This forum was jointly hosted by the China Petroleum and Chemical Industry Federation ( CPCIF ), the China National Resources Recycling Association ( CRRA ), and the China Plastics Processing Industry Association ( CPPIA ), with co-organization by the Green Recycled Plastics Supply Chain Joint Working Group ( GRPG ). Coinciding with GRPG's fifth anniversary, the successful hosting of the forum and the active participation and experience sharing of pioneers like Vary Tech will undoubtedly inject strong momentum into the development of China's green recycled plastic supply chain, collectively driving innovation in the plastic circular economy.
