Petrochemical plants on Yangtze clean up their acts

Yichang city, Hubei province, has been striving to get rid of petrochemical plants along the banks of the Yangtze River since 2016 to help protect China's "mother river".

And it seems the efforts of the authorities have paid off over the past three years. Yichang's economy has started to recover after huge economic reforms, while the ecology of the Yangtze River is also improving.

By 2020, the city government plans to use four methods to tackle the problem of 134 petrochemical companies located within a kilometer of the river's banks - shut down, transform, relocate or switch to other industries. Fifty-two companies have finished the process while another 40 will follow suit this year.

The Yichang government recently announced that in the first half of this year, the city's gross domestic product was over 207.75 billion yuan ($30.2 billion) - ranking second in the province and an 8.2 percent increase over the same period last year. The increase in the national gross domestic product during the same period was 6.3 percent.

The city government has set up a fund of 500 million yuan, dispensed from 2018 to 2020, to help petrochemical companies relocate to new industrial parks.

In April of last year, President Xi Jinping visited Yichang to inspect the reforms of the chemical industry and environmental restoration and protection of the Yangtze River.

Since 2016, Hubei Xingfa Chemicals Group has shut down about one-third of its production capacity and four chemical waste discharge flues along the Yangtze River.

The demolished area occupied 53.3 hectares, with an estimated loss of assets value of 1.2 billion yuan. Their new chemical industrial park in Yichang is located away from the river.

The group spent 2 billion yuan on transforming and upgrading its facilities and plans to change its focus to environmentally friendly chemical production within three to five years.

"With the rapid development of the chemical industry worldwide, the relocation is an opportunity to transform and upgrade our business, including our equipment," said Chen Xiaoqing, assistant to the general manager of the group.

"With the new equipment installed, the area of our new chemical industrial park is only 40 percent of the original. The three waste emissions - gas, water and residue - have been reduced by half while output value has increased greatly," he said.

Li Guozhang, chairman of the group, said last year sales income increased 6.68 percent from 2017 to 37.9 billion yuan.

The Hubei Sanning Chemical Industry has shut down a chemical plant and relocated a urea fertilizer plant.

Last year, it started construction of a 10 billion yuan ethylene glycol plant, which will go into operation early next year. Ethylene glycol is used in the manufacture of products like plastic, rubber and polyester.

Ruan Huizhen, a manager of the Sanning company, said they visited other plants to study what they did.

"The project will optimize structures and increase output greatly, with much less emission of the three wastes. The advanced intelligent equipment means there will be fewer workers involved in the project," she said.

She said they will aim to make ethylene glycol from coal.

"It's good for environmental protection and is sustainable. It saves the use of petroleum, as China has more coal than petroleum."