After years of success with his paper mills, Lin Xingyue suddenly found he could no longer land a new project anywhere in China this year, not even in the underdeveloped western region.
"Papermaking projects are unwelcome nowadays because they consume too much water and are highly polluting," said Lin, a businessman from Wenzhou, a manufacturing powerhouse in the eastern Zhejiang Province.
According to Lin, nearly all Chinese localities have boosted their recycling-based economies in the last two or three years with eco-friendly industrial parks, where polluting projects with high input and low yield are almost always unwelcome.
In fact, the government and businesses in China have taken concrete actions to foster a recycling-based economy with clean production and the ISO14000 environmental management system.
China's overall energy efficiency stands at 33 percent, about 10 percent lower than the world average, but its energy cost for per unit GDP is three times the world average, said Qu Geping, a senior environment official.
China's top lawmaking body, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, plans to enact a law to promote a recycling-based economy. A draft of the law will be ready for deliberation in 2007.
Experts say a recycling-based economy that features more efficient energy consumption, lower emissions and higher returns, will ensure fast economic and social development with the lowest possible costs and least damage to the environment.
The Yellow River Industrial and Trading Group in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is one of the early birds. The company has reported an annual increase of 40 million yuan (US$4.9 million) in economic returns by recycling industrial waste.
The company produces coke with refined coal, makes iron and steel with coke and turns waste into slag concrete. It also generates electricity with waste rocks and gas, and the remaining heat can be used for heating. Concrete is made out of solid wastes, and chemicals emitted at coke refinery foster the chemical industry.
"A recycling-based economy will lead China's new round of economic growth," said Zhu Zhaoliang with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.