Ningbo City, Electroplating Industry, Cleaner Production Demonstration Study

Along with rapid economic growth, resource exhausted and environment pollution happened during 20th century. Countries all over the world pay more attention to environment protection. The terminology "cleaner production", which indicated the overall solution from material, production procedure to products usage, was firstly proposed by the Industry & Environment Programming Center of UNPD and has been an ultimate method against industry pollution, since 1989.Ningbo City locates in China east coast with rapid economic growth. However, due to the traditional production concept and mode, environmental problems come to be serious day by day. Ningbo local government called on industry to apply cleaner production for benefit both economy and environment.Two cases in Ningbo were studied in the paper: Ningbo Beilun Metal& Plastic Electroplating Company and Ningbo Fenghua Yulong Chemical New Material Co., Ltd. The necessity to apply cleaner production for both two electroplating factories was analyzed. After professional production audit, 34 cleaner production projects were put forward by these two factories. Among these projects, 20 were less/no fee projects and 14 were normal/high cost projects, which were applied successfully. Both factories not only saved the cost of raw material, but also reduced the castoff and improved the company image.According to the current situation and experience of cleaner production application in Ningbo, several obstacles were concluded: (1) Most company owners were lack of consciousness of cleaner production; (2) Because of low cost of resources and the pollution fee, there were no pressure or impetus for companies to applied environmental protection; (3) The procedure of cleaner production audit were very complex; (4)There were no technical communication or compensation on cleaner production from government; (5) Most companies had less capital on technical innovation. (6) The current management principles and policies related to cleaner production were shortage. Several suggestions on policies and technical solutions according to above obstacles were proposed in the article, which will be used for carrying out cleaner production in Ningbo.