The situation, opportunity and challenge facing the new era of paper industry

Face the inevitable trend of green development

Domestic prominent resources, energy, environmental bottlenecks and major changes in consumption structure have forced the industry to change to a green development mode.

The industry faces fierce competition for global resources, markets and capital, as well as more obvious green barriers to product trade.

The situation requires the industry to give full play to the characteristics of the circular economy and the green and low-carbon attributes of plant raw materials, rely on technological progress, innovate the development model, and implement the sustainable development strategy.

Structure, resources and environment

At present, the paper industry needs to face three major challenges

The challenge of structural adjustment

◆ Enterprise structure

Under the inertia thinking of quantity leading and scale expansion, paper production capacity is still rapidly accumulating and expanding; In the situation of increasing industrial concentration, scattered small and medium-sized production capacity is also expanding; How to form an industrial organization structure in which large enterprises are prominent and the proportion of small and medium-sized enterprises is reasonable; How to effectively prevent blind expansion of production capacity on the basis of ensuring domestic demand and supply is the major challenge facing us at present.

At present, because of the problem of waste paper raw materials, government departments have investigated the domestic waste paper pulping and paper production capacity under construction, approved and approved, and the new production capacity has reached more than 40 million tons, and the total investment has reached more than 150 billion yuan. This is a strong early warning signal to the industry, for projects that have been approved but have not yet been built, to decide carefully.

◆ Product structure

The product homogenization phenomenon is serious, and the differentiation and functionalization ability are insufficient; Not fully formed to meet the needs of the diversified consumer market, the formation of high, fine, special, differentiated product structure.

In the face of the growing needs of the people for a better life, actively cultivate and guide the market from the supply side, especially the processing paper and paper products manufacturing industry, which needs to accelerate the optimization of variety structure and improve product quality; Strengthen varieties and brand cultivation, publicize the quality of the brand and the green concept of the industry to the society, and narrow the gap with international varieties and brands.

◆ Raw material structure

The contradiction between supply and demand of raw materials is prominent, and the degree of external dependence is increasing year by year. In the early days of reform and opening up, China's external dependence on raw materials was less than 5%, and now the imported wood pulp, waste paper and wood chips have been converted to external dependence of more than 50%, increasing the risk of industry operation.

The change of raw material policy still has long-term uncertainty, which brings trouble to the decision-making of enterprises.

The bottleneck of domestic raw material resources has not broken through, the amount of available resources is limited, the amount of domestic resources and the proportion of raw materials are declining, and the proportion of pulp produced by domestic wood raw materials and non-wood raw materials is less than 10%, and there is a downward trend.

The pulp made from imported wood chips, imported commercial pulp, imported waste paper, imported finished paper and waste paper generated by paper products jointly support domestic paper production and supplement domestic waste paper cycle losses, or theoretically, most of the fiber content of domestic recycled waste paper originally comes from plants growing abroad and maintains the quality of domestic waste paper.

The amount of domestic waste paper recycling is close to the theoretical recyclable amount, such as household paper and other products can not be recycled. In addition, each year with the products exported to foreign countries, packaging paper, instructions and other products are far more than imports. It is estimated that more than 30 million tons of paper are exported to foreign countries with products each year, while less than 10 million tons of paper are imported into the country. If you continue to increase the amount of recycling, it is possible to recycle some paper that cannot be recycled, or add a lot of impurities. If the supplement is insufficient for a long time, the domestic recyclable amount, the quality of waste paper and the proportion of waste pulp varieties will not be maintained.

The balance between various types of pulp, such as the balance of semi-chemical pulp itself, is mainly applied to corrugated base paper. Now the domestic basically shut down, the only supplement is foreign waste paper, if this part of the source is not, it will affect the production of domestic corrugated paper. The product quality of corrugated paper will decline, which will affect the downstream packaging industry.