China Boosts Green Packaging Incentives: Eligible Firms Can Access Up to RMB 5 Million in R&D Funding

China is further strengthening support for the environmental protection industry. Under the Ministry of Finance's Measures for the Administration of High-Tech R&D Funds for the Packaging Industry, China aims to standardize high-tech R&D fund management for packaging, encourage packaging companies to develop new products and adopt new technologies, and drive the circular economy and green packaging sector. From now on, eligible companies may access R&D funding of up to RMB 5 million. Supported projects include those with a certain level or eligibility, new eco-friendly packaging material projects that protect personal health and safety and meet environmental requirements, packaging reduction and energy-saving projects, and packaging waste treatment and utilization projects. All must align with national macro policies and environmental protection and circular economy policy. Non-repayable subsidies and loan interest subsidies are the two main support methods.

Promoting Green Packaging: Recommendations and a Green Packaging Evaluation Framework

China's current life cycle assessment (LCA) method still faces major operational hurdles. The calculation process, for instance, is highly complex and laborious, with considerable workload and difficulty. Data collection for the inventory, the core step of LCA, remains challenging; impact assessment also requires defining various equivalence coefficients and weights, and converting different units and dimensions is far from easy. As a result, the conditions for broadly applying LCA are not yet fully in place, and widespread adoption will require a fairly long preparatory period. To move green packaging forward in a timely manner, a two-step approach is needed: first grade green packaging, then apply different review standards to each grade.

AA-grade green packaging refers to moderate packaging whose waste can be recycled for reuse, regenerated or degraded, whose toxic substances stay within prescribed limits, and which causes no hazard to human health or the environment across the product's full life cycle. For AA-grade packaging, LCA can be used to set certification standards, or its inventory analysis and impact assessment data can be used directly as evaluation criteria, with the corresponding IS0140001-type and Type III environmental labels awarded. A-grade green packaging refers to moderate packaging whose waste can be recycled for reuse, regenerated or degraded and whose toxic substances remain within prescribed limits.

For A-grade green packaging, five actionable indicators can be set based on its definition: whether packaging is reduced in volume or weight; whether toxic or hazardous components in packaging materials exceed limits; whether the packaging product carries the manufacturer's 'self-declared environmental claim'; whether it can be reused or recovered and regenerated; and whether it can degrade on its own. Products that meet these indicators can receive a single-factor environmental label.

Building China's green packaging evaluation system touches the entire journey of packaging products—manufacturing, use, recovery and disposal—and also involves China's foreign trade law, inspection and quarantine regulations and other packaging rules. From the strategic perspective of sustainable development, China must create an effectively operating green packaging system that covers national legislation, departmental oversight, industry coordination, enterprise implementation, research institution support and broad public participation.

Improving Regulations and Building an Operating Mechanism for Green Packaging

The sourcing and volume of packaging materials, along with waste gas and wastewater emissions during manufacturing and the recovery, reuse and regeneration of packaging waste, all depend on laws, regulations and other administrative and economic measures.

On the regulatory front, further strengthening is required.

Major national laws—the Environmental Protection Law, the Cleaner Production Promotion Law, the Law on the Prevention and Control of Environmental Pollution by Solid Waste, the Water Pollution Prevention and Control Law, and the Air Pollution Prevention and Control Law—provide strong legal backing for environmental protection. Nevertheless, supporting regulations tailored to industry realities still need further improvement.

Second, use tax policy to balance corporate and public interests. Most packaging manufacturers and importers in China focus only on their own interests and rarely consider the natural environment or public interest proactively; in production, they tend to rely on virgin materials rather than recycled materials.

To strengthen conservation-oriented economic awareness and boost packaging waste recovery, an environmental pollution tax is suggested for packaging producers and for manufacturers and importers that use packaging, applied to the gap between the amount produced or imported and the amount of packaging recovered. The larger the gap, the higher the tax rate. Similar practices have long existed abroad.

Third, set clear recovery targets for packaging waste and establish a society-wide recovery mechanism for it. At the same time, increase funding to support R&D in green packaging.

Fourth, carry out broad publicity and education to create a favorable social atmosphere for green packaging. Units linked to technology, law, management and education should pool their strengths and work together to implement circular economy and conservation-oriented economy policies and advance green packaging.

—Reprinted from China Packaging Network (pack.cn). Original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-362191.html