From fertilizer bags to clothes to the world's largest producer of chemical fiber

In the late 1970s, a strange kind of black trousers appeared in the Chinese countryside - they were strong, wear-resistant and could not be worn out for a long time. Is vaguely can see the above printed words, some pants after long-term washing, the handwriting is more clear, what "25kg" "made in Japan" see clearly.

Where on earth did these strange pants come from?

It turned out that at that time, China was struggling to survive. In order to solve the food difficulties, China imported a large amount of urea from Japan as fertilizer.

It's hard to eat, not much better to dress. At that time, urban Chinese people only had a small number of cloth tickets a year, not enough to make a pair of pants; The peasants in the countryside were so ragged that they had no trousers to wear.

Therefore, after the urea is used up, the nylon bag is dyed to make a pair of pants, which can be described as "turning waste into treasure". However, the printing and dyeing technology at that time was not up to standard, and after several washing, the words above would be revealed in their true shape. News across the sea, Japan is also very shocked, did not expect even nylon bags are used to make clothes...

At that time, the color of domestic clothes was basically only gray, blue, and black, and they wore the same clothes, and foreign media called them "blue ants" or "gray ants".

In just a few decades, Chinese clothing has changed from single to diverse, what is the story behind it?

The evolution of Chinese dress

Before the Song Dynasty

In China, there is only the word "cotton" next to silk, and no word "cotton" next to wood. The so-called silk wool is the material woven from silk.

However, silk wool is extremely expensive, by no means ordinary people can afford to consume, it can only be enjoyed by dignitaries. The vast majority of the working people can only use hemp, ramie and kudu to make clothes. In the cold winter, there is often no warmth.

Like many agricultural products, cotton is not native to China, but is also "imported", originating in what is now India, Arabia.

When cotton first entered China, people only regarded it as an ornamental plant and did not realize its economic value.

Early Yuan Dynasty to Ming Dynasty

The cultivation of cotton in China has further expanded. By the late Ming Dynasty, weaving entered a new era of workshops, when cotton planting and cotton weaving had spread throughout the country. The Yangtze River Delta region is the most popular. The sound of weaving machines in every household is incessant day and night.

Since the Opium War

As China's market is increasingly open, cloth sales into China, a great impact on China's handmade cotton industry.

After the Sino-Japanese War

The growth of cloth gradually accelerated. Among them are mainly American and Japanese cloth, which is not inferior to Chinese local cloth in terms of price or durability, and thus has a great impact on the domestic market.

The old collection of the palace of the Ming and Qing dynasties royal imperial robes

From these words, it can be seen that during this period, the source of clothing in China was still based on natural materials - cotton woven cloth, and chemical fiber clothes had not yet come out. In other words, whoever controls the cotton controls the clothes on the Chinese.

Dilemma: Enough to eat? Wear warm clothes?

As the main source of cloth, cotton is one of the cash crops with the lowest yield per acre. But one mu of high-yield cotton field in the scientific management of modern agriculture, the highest is only 600 jin.

Second, in the early days of the founding of New China, the Chinese government spent a lot of foreign exchange to import grain and cotton. Even so, the problem of food and clothing for the Chinese people has not been fundamentally solved.

In the country's most difficult economic times, even in the capital Beijing, each person is issued 2.5 feet of cloth tickets per year, basically a family of three cloth tickets together, enough to cut a pair of pants. Because of the extremely tight supply, many families have not added new clothes for years, and even give clothes worn by older children to young children. As the saying goes, "New three years, old three years, sewing and fixing for another three years."

Land is limited, is it growing food? Or grow cotton? If you want to satisfy the clothing problem of the whole Chinese people, then many people will be hungry.

At the beginning of the founding of new China, the contradiction of grain and cotton competing for land was also one of the most challenging national economy and people's livelihood issues faced by the new regime. At that time, cotton was not only a scarce livelihood material, but also an important bargaining chip to stabilize the market. In the days without chemical fiber, cotton is indeed difficult to bear the weight of hundreds of millions of people's clothing alone.

How to get out of the dilemma?

Extracting aromatics from crude oil

There is only one way - to make something out of nothing! In the final analysis, the ultimate solution to the contradiction between grain and cotton and land is to rely on chemical fibers. Therefore, this wisp of rayon can not only "enrich clothes", but also make a great contribution to our "sufficient food" today.

When chemical fiber was invented in the early 20th century, it was completely out of the imitation of silk spinning. When people found that the viscosity of polyester polymer compounds such as petroleum as raw materials can be used to draw silk, human beings have been liberated to a large extent - for thousands of years, the first of the four things supporting "food, clothing, housing and transportation" is the natural cycle of "silk spinning, yarn spinning cloth", its dependence on natural fibers based on cotton has caused long-term problems in human society.

In China, after the middle of Ming Dynasty, there were mulberry competing for rice fields and cotton competing for grain fields. In the West, there was the enclosure of sheep in the 12th century, and through the slow development of the 13th to the 15th century, it eventually evolved into the enclosure movement that spawned the modern capitalist revolution in Britain.

Remember "Dacron", "dacron"? Dacron was originally an exotic Dacron. Originally appearing in Hong Kong, people call it "Dacron" according to Cantonese. Because it is durable and good-looking, every family is rushing to buy it. Dacron, a kind of polyester fiber, is also one of the earliest in China. Early dacron, with all the advantages of polyester fiber, that is, strong, crisp, easy to rinse; But it also has all the shortcomings of ordinary chemical fiber, that is, poor water absorption, easy static electricity, air permeability, etc.)

Girls especially like to wear red skirts, boys especially like to wear Dacron. In that era, if you can receive a piece of Dacron clothing, the return rate is quite high! This is aromatics technology.

Aromatics are an important foundation of the chemical industry, widely used in the three major synthetic materials as well as medicine, national defense, pesticides, building materials and other fields. Paraxylene is one of the largest aromatic varieties, closely related to people's lives, it is the initial raw material for the synthesis of the most widely used polyester fiber, through polyester slicing, drawing, textile, and then made into clothing or other daily use.

However, in the 1960s and 1970s, China's technology was still very backward, and it did not have the ability to process crude oil into fiber, and it could only rely on a small amount of imported fiber for processing every year, which was far from meeting the huge market demand. This is where the sad story of fertilizer bags being turned into pants comes in at the beginning of this article.

To solve the problem of clothing for 800 million people in China

In the early 1970s, from site selection, land reclamation to ignition test, the pioneers spent more than 5 years to build China's largest modern petroleum chemical fiber production base - Shanghai Petrochemical on the Jinshanwei Beach on the north side of Hangzhou Bay.

In 1979, polyester network yarn was successfully trial-produced

In 1977, bearing the historical mission of solving the people's "difficulty in dressing", Yizheng chemical fiber was included in the national key introduction project.

In 1978, the headquarters was prepared

In Yizheng County guest house office site ▲

In December 1983, the country canceled the cloth ticket, cotton opened the supply, people no longer worry about clothes.

On December 30, 1984, the first polyester production line of Yizheng Chemical Fiber Polyester Plant was opened and qualified polyester chips were produced.

In December 1984, Yihua phase I was completed and put into operation

On April 26, 1985, the first polyester staple fiber production line of the first Polyester plant was successfully put into production and qualified polyester staple fiber was produced.

1985 Polyester first plant spinning production ▲

June 1989, the company's first fashion show ▲

In the 1990s, Yizheng Chemical fiber I and II projects were fully completed and put into operation, forming an annual production capacity of 500,000 tons of chemical fiber and raw materials, accounting for one-third of China's synthetic fiber production, which can provide a set of "Dacron" new clothes for each person in China every year, which greatly alleviated the problem of difficult dressing for Chinese people.

Yizheng chemical fiber I and II projects completed and put into operation ▲

However, new problems ensued - the core of the entire polyester industry chain is to solve the problem of people's clothing, and the production technology of aromatic hydrocarbons, an important source of the polyester industry, has been dependent on imports.

Relevant data show that in the past 15 years, the average annual growth rate of paraxylene consumption of major aromatics in China is as high as 20%. However, the self-sufficiency rate of p-xylene in our country is only 50%, an important reason is that the production technology of aromatics has long been dependent on imports, the technical cost is expensive, and the industrial development is subject to people.

Before 2010, only the United States and France in the world have complete sets of technology to produce aromatics, and the technical barriers are very high. It has become an important goal for Sinopec to develop its own aromatic hydrocarbon production technology as soon as possible.

However, an important difficulty in the production of aromatics, adsorbents, has not been successfully developed. Without qualified adsorbents, it is impossible to obtain high purity aromatic product paraxylene.

After several failures, in 2008, the second generation of adsorbents was successfully developed, and only the most critical bastion of aromatic technology - the adsorption separation device was not overcome. Because of the comprehensive blockade of foreign technology, in the early stage of the project, everything had to be started from scratch, and experts and scholars who had conducted research and development work for decades felt helpless, which almost became an impossible task.

Under the pressure of all parties, Sun Lily, general manager of Sinopec Engineering Construction Co., LTD., began to lead everyone to analyze from the principle and function, focusing on the most critical technical difficulties, the layer by layer grid that supports the adsorbent in the adsorption separation device.

On December 15, 2013, Hainan Refining and aromatics joint plant produced first-level paraxylene products, and Sinopec became the third company in the world with a complete set of patented technology for aromatics production.

Sinopec's "Development and Application of High Efficiency and Environmental Protection Aromatic hydrocarbon Complete Set Technology" won the 2015 National Science and Technology Progress Grand Prize.

Sinopec has been grinding a sword for 40 years! With this sword, we will cut off the monopoly and profiteering of certain countries!

Although, in the tide of world economic integration, China's reform and opening up, the introduction of foreign advanced technology to enhance China's innovation and manufacturing capacity; However, the most core and most related to the lifeblood of the national economy are all made by ourselves! Now, even if we want to import, we can get a preferential price!

Innovation is the right to speak! Innovation is pricing power! The complete set of technologies supported by the complete innovation is the base of the chemical power!

From "Dacron" to ylon, from aromatic complete sets of technology to polyester industry chain, from letting people wear shirts to wear good clothes, China's petrochemical industry workers silently overcome one technical difficulty after another!

Now, China has become the world's first chemical fiber production and consumption country. From the problem of people's clothing, it can be seen that for a large country, the living standard of its people is closely related to the degree of industrialization. It is because of the development of the chemical industry that "difficult to dress" has become a thing of the past in China. In just a few decades, more than one billion Chinese people can wear warm and decent clothes!

Development of chemical fiber

With the rapid progress of polyester industry technology, the performance of chemical fiber has far exceeded that of natural fibers (cotton, hemp, etc.). It can be said that the current chemical fiber, second kill all natural fibers, including the so-called "soft gold" cashmere.

Because it can be customized: you want down, make down; You want cashmere, you make cashmere, and the feel, the physical properties are better than the best cashmere.

Differentiated polyester fibers, clothing designers can think of, can not think of, want all the performance, has been available. Now the most advanced fabrics, are chemical fiber, rather than cotton, wool and the like.