State Tobacco Monopoly Administration Sets 13.5 Million Carton Recycling Goal for 2015

On October 20, the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration released a notice setting the 2015 recycling targets for cigarette packaging cartons across the tobacco industry. The directive calls for the entire industry to recycle 13.5 million cartons next year. This breaks down into 10 million cartons for industrial and commercial enterprises within the same province (autonomous region or municipality) and 3.5 million for their counterparts in neighboring provinces. Provincial-level industrial and commercial enterprises were also given concrete assignments and clear expectations.

The notice highlights that recycling cigarette packaging cartons has substantial long-term significance: it supports the industry's shift in development approach, advances a circular economic system, reinforces a responsible tobacco image, and helps consolidate the tobacco monopoly system. Industry units are therefore expected to treat this work as a key part of production and operations, give it serious attention, and drive implementation.

The notice calls for stronger assessment, reward, and penalty systems, along with tighter supervision, inspection, evaluation, and reporting on progress and quality. Units are also urged to improve coordination and prepare early for carton recycling in neighboring provinces. This includes jointly building a quality traceability mechanism for recycled cigarette packaging cartons, refining workflows and quality standards, adding more brands and specifications to the recycling program, expanding recycling scale, and increasing production scheduling for recycled cartons so annual targets are fully met.

For cooperative production, the notice states that brand-exporting enterprises should create favorable conditions for carton recycling by brand-receiving enterprises. Receiving companies are allowed to use recycled packaging cartons for cigarettes sold locally and for cigarettes shipped directly to neighboring provinces for sale.

To increase the carton recycling resources available to industrial enterprises and ensure annual targets are met, sales of key cigarette brands in major markets outside neighboring provinces will be counted into the carton recovery and return base for the relevant commercial enterprises. Those commercial enterprises must return all such cartons to the relevant industrial enterprises. To facilitate receipt and return transport in neighboring provinces and major markets for key brands, logistics management departments of provincial bureaus (companies) are to take the lead, centralize and properly keep cartons from the relevant industrial enterprises, hand them over to industrial enterprises in a coordinated manner, and establish handover records.

——This article is reposted from China Packaging Network (pack.cn). Original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-361750.html