Summary: From 2024 to 2025, China's total home appliance trade-ins reached 192 million units, while only 53 million waste appliances and phones were formally dismantled in the same period. Haier's Recycle Interconnected Factory in Laixi, Qingdao, began production in September 2022, with an annual dismantling capacity of 2 million waste appliances and 30,000 tonnes of recycled materials. Another industrial park is under construction in Gong'an, Jingzhou, Hubei, planned for 2.4 million units of dismantling and 100,000 tonnes of recycled material capacity.

Key Points:

  • 192 million trade-ins versus 53 million formally dismantled units leaves about 140 million old appliances unaccounted for
  • The EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) entered formal collection in January 2026, with Q2 certificate prices at €75.28 per tonne, and is proposed to expand to about 180 downstream products by 2028
  • China's GB/T 46730-2025 "Specification for the Use of Recycled Materials in Household Electrical Appliances" took effect in May 2026, shifting recycled materials from price substitution toward standards competition

The Material Ledger of One Refrigerator

According to an in-depth report by Dazhong Daily, at Haier's Recycle Interconnected Factory in Laixi, Qingdao, old refrigerators enter the dismantling line and are grabbed by robotic arms for feeding. Refrigerant is first safely recovered, compressors are drilled and drained of oil, and the shells then enter crushing and multi-stage sorting, where iron, copper, aluminum, and plastic are separated and stored individually. According to data provided by the factory, 10,000 waste refrigerators can yield 1,300 kg of copper, 150,000 kg of iron, nearly 50,000 kg of plastic, and 30,000 kg of flat glass; a single refrigerator can yield over 20 types of materials, among which plastic, after washing and pelletizing, can reach 99.9% purity and replace virgin materials in automotive, personal care, home furnishing, and home appliance applications.

The China Association of Circular Economy estimates that in 2025, China's total waste home appliance collection exceeded 200 million units. According to Li Xiuqing, head of Haier Smart Home's Circular Economy Industry Development Platform, taking the example of plastic accounting for 30% of a washing machine, without using recycled materials, the cost per unit would increase by 10 yuan on that alone.

Front-End Collection Must Be Sufficient for the Back End to Be Fed

The organization of the collection end carries significant weight in this system. Haier attaches collection touchpoints to its existing service network, leveraging over 100,000 service personnel and more than 100 logistics distribution centers to reverse the new-appliance delivery chain for old-appliance collection. When a reporter accompanied collector Master Wang on a door-to-door visit, the standard kit included a work uniform and a QR code badge. A photo and scan immediately calculated the residual value assessment price of an old refrigerator at 180 yuan, and ordering a new appliance could offset another 200 yuan; before the old unit was even moved, approximately 42 kg of carbon emission reductions had already been credited. Pricing relies on the "Product Recycling, Dismantling and Reuse Full-Process Control Platform R&D and Demonstration" project under the Ministry of Science and Technology's key R&D program, integrating online and offline multi-source data to quantitatively assess the residual value of waste appliances.

In the middle of the chain, the collection end and the dismantling end can coordinate production line loads according to rhythm, amortizing the operating costs of dismantling plants; at the data level, Haier is jointly building a data platform with units including the Solid Waste and Chemicals Management Technology Center of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment.

Carbon Tariffs Push Standards to the Forefront

Pressure on the export side is simultaneously approaching. The EU CBAM entered its formal collection phase in January this year, currently covering six categories of goods: cement, electricity, fertilizers, hydrogen, steel, and aluminum. According to its expansion proposal released at the end of last year, approximately 180 steel- and aluminum-intensive downstream products will be included from 2028, including machinery and equipment, auto parts, and some home appliances. The EU's Q2 CBAM certificate price announced in July this year is €75.28 per tonne of CO2 equivalent.

The report states that the real contest is over standards. At present, international carbon accounting rules and product carbon footprint systems have long been dominated by Europe and the United States. If exporting companies cannot provide recognized third-party verification data, they can only pay taxes according to the default values set by the EU, which are typically 30% to 50% higher than the actual emission levels of Chinese products. The Ministry of Commerce has also previously stated its position on the EU's practice of setting relatively high basic default values for Chinese products and raising them year by year, considering it unfair and discriminatory treatment. Domestic recycled materials have previously suffered from vague quality grading and missing performance standards, making it "difficult to get a good price for quality."

The corresponding move is to keep data and standards in one's own hands: the "Specification for the Use of Recycled Materials in Household Electrical Appliances" (GB/T 46730-2025), implemented in May this year, was advanced and refined by Haier Smart Home's Circular Economy Industry as the main drafting unit, together with the China Household Electric Appliance Research Institute and multiple home appliance, materials, and recycling enterprises, providing a basis for the evaluation and selection, process control, supply chain traceability, and usage rate calculation of recycled materials in home appliances. The report argues that the competition in recycled materials will no longer remain at price substitution but enter a comprehensive competition stage involving quality stability, traceable sourcing, and batch consistency.

Capacity Layout and Industry Bottlenecks

The Laixi factory, which began production in September 2022, is Haier's first recycling factory; the recycling industrial park located in Gong'an, Jingzhou, Hubei, is under construction, planned with 6 customized intelligent dismantling lines and 18 recycled new material pelletizing lines. Once operational, it will have the capacity to dismantle 2.4 million waste appliances and regenerate 100,000 tonnes of recycled materials annually, mainly serving demand in Central China and the Yangtze River Economic Belt. Li Huagang, Senior Vice President of Haier Group and Chairman of Haier Smart Home, stated at the groundbreaking ceremony that the Gong'an industrial park should be built into the world's most advanced dismantling factory in the shortest possible time. According to estimates, the coverage radius of a recycling factory is between 200 and 300 kilometers; beyond that, logistics costs rise rapidly and the project becomes uneconomical.

Institutional pressure is equally clear. The Ecological Environment Code passed in March 2026 includes a dedicated chapter on "Circular Economy," upgrading the extended producer responsibility system from a soft constraint to a hard target; in June 2026, the National Development and Reform Commission issued the "14th Five-Year Plan for Circular Economy Development," proposing that by 2030 the output value of the resource recycling industry reach 8 trillion yuan and the annual recycling volume of major renewable resources reach 510 million tonnes. The scale of the trade-in policy is already considerable: from 2024 to 2025, total home appliance trade-ins reached 192 million units, while the industry's statistically recorded formal dismantling volume in the same period was only 53 million units, leaving about 140 million old appliances in a data gray zone.

The cost structure is the primary reason pressing on this gap. Compliant enterprises dismantling solid waste typically must bear multiple costs including environmental protection facilities, safety production, tax compliance, and traceability system construction, while informal channels represented by street-corner peddlers buying old appliances have an advantage in bidding because they bear almost none of these costs, creating a situation where formal factories are underfed, small workshops cannot be shut down, and overall balance is repeatedly discussed—for enterprises, the report suggests two triggers: compliance costs can be exchanged from formal recycling into possible new machine sales, and the brand's direct department may bring new channel cost issues. The specific new door-to-door old appliance collection channel costs, including the recycling department's pre-profit involving environmental old material subsidies and package values, are not clearly explained, and audits also appear.

Source: In-depth Investigation | "Between To and Fro": The Global Manufacturing Game in a Recycling Factory_Shandong_Dazhong.com · Originally published on 2026-09-30