Recently, the Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference 2023 was held in Boao, Hainan. During the conference, CCTV's special program "Listening to the Tide in Boao" focused on Shenghong's green transformation, which uses technological innovation to drive industrial upgrade to make a "big story" out of "small plastic bottles".
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Shengze Town in Wujiang District, Jiangsu Province, is one of China's largest production and trading centers for garment fabrics, home to over 2,000 garment fabric manufacturers. Here, even small fabrics can be transformed into a complex and sophisticated product. Today, we'll visit one of these companies to see how a discarded plastic bottle can be transformed into a new garment made of recycled fibers.
After being washed, the transparent plastic bottles are cut into pieces about the size of a fingernail. Each bottle weighs approximately 20 grams, and a large bag of these pieces weighs nearly 700 kilograms. Next, they undergo more than a dozen processes to become fine filaments of recycled fiber. With improved production processes, the company has eliminated secondary drying and remelting steps, reducing the unit energy consumption for recycled fiber production by about 30%.
Silkworms eat mulberry leaves and spin fine threads; machines digest plastic bottles, and now they're spinning fine filaments of recycled fibers. The freshly spun filaments need a flashlight to clearly see their rapid movement. More than 100 of these filaments are blended into a relatively thick filament, but still only 0.15 millimeters in diameter, the internal structure of which can be clearly seen through a microscope.
With improved production technology, the recycled fiber threads produced by the machines are becoming increasingly longer. Here, a single machine can produce up to 5 kilometers of recycled fiber threads per minute, and the longest single thread can reach over 1,000 kilometers, equivalent to the straight-line distance from Hainan to Shanghai.
Rolls of recycled fibers, after being spun and cut, can be transformed into new garments. The recycled fiber garment I'm wearing today weighs only about 100 grams and feels incredibly light and breathable even after wearing it all day. According to engineers, this garment consumed about ten mineral water bottles. This company can consume 20 billion waste plastic bottles annually, producing 350,000 tonnes of recycled fiber while reducing carbon emissions by over 1 million tons.
In recent years, the industry of manufacturing recycled fibers from waste plastic bottles has grown rapidly. From the early stage, it could only produce short fibers, and now it has steadily mass-produced flexible filaments. With the improvement of production quality, recycled fiber materials have gone from laboratories and display cabinets to the world and entered the lives of thousands of households.
Behind the green upgrading of industries lies strong scientific research support. This is exemplified by the National Advanced Functional Fiber Innovation Center located in Shengze.
The research findings of key laboratories can be shared by enterprises and utilized by the industry. Look at this fiber made from crab shells; it's very skin-friendly and can be used to make mask base fabrics and medical dressings. Materials made from corn stalk fibers are as soft and breathable as pure cotton and can degrade naturally
With the continuous growth of technological capabilities in energy-saving and carbon-reducing production, raw material reuse, and the protection of nature, the concept of low-carbon living is becoming more deeply rooted in people's hearts.
Practicing excellence and leading the future, the Shenghong Holding Group will adhere to the concept of green development and further enhance its green management model across the entire industrial chain and product lifecycle. While driving the green transformation of the textile industry through innovation, the group will also deepen the construction of three million-tonne-level projects; photovoltaic-grade EVA, acrylonitrile, and green biodegradable materials. Focusing on three major directions; new energy, high-performance new materials, and green and low-carbon; the group will accelerate the mastery of more "killer" key technologies, forming a core competitiveness that leverages green content to achieve high value, building a leading innovative initiative and a green discourse power for the future.
