China's Maturing Market

摘要

In its five-year history, the China Secondary Metal International Forum has invited numerous Chinese government officials, scrap industry leaders, and academic experts to address the necessity, means, and will for China to modernize its nonferrous scrap metal recycling industry. It wasn't until this year, though- at the sixth forum, held Nov. 8-9 in Taizhou-that forum participants, saw the results of those previous discussions and speeches. Indeed, the evidence was literally visible outside the conference hotel: Taizhou, a major scrap center once notorious for environmentally unsafe processing, is being transformed. The city's small-scale dismantlers, many based in home workshops, are virtually gone. Now its major scrap processors reside in one of China's most advanced-and environmentally strict-resource-recycling parks. Though Taizhou, located in east China's Zhejiang province, isn't representative of China's scrap recycling industry as a whole, it certainly symbolizes the direction China's top regulators want the scrap industry to go. It's no accident, then, that the forum's organizer-the China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association's Metal Recycling Branch-chose Taizhou for this year's event.