On December 2, 2025, China Environment News published an article titled ‘Turning Emerging Industrial Waste into an “Urban Mineral Wealth” – Chengyang District of Qingdao Provides Targeted Services to Lighten the Burden on Enterprises’ on its Industrial Economy page, acknowledging North Star Recycling’s contribution to the construction of a ‘zero-waste city.’ The following is an excerpt from the original text:
Walking into the production base of North Star Advanced Recycling Technology (Qingdao) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as North Star Recycling), modern production lines are running efficiently, transforming emerging industrial waste such as retired lithium-ion batteries and scrap electrode sheet offcuts into valuable reusable resources.
According to the company’s leadership, the company’s self-developed dry pre-treatment technology for retired power batteries effectively addresses key technologies including environmental protection, safety, real-time precise accounting of carbon footprints, and traceability. Through fine-tuned atmosphere control, it achieves shredding of charged batteries, eliminating safety hazards, and enables efficient separation and recovery of the electrolyte, establishing a full-component separation and recovery system that turns yesterday’s ‘environmental burden’ into a ‘rich deposit’ of precious resources such as cobalt, nickel, and lithium. The technology reduces carbon emissions by 30% compared with other technologies, and the digitalization level of the production line is industry-leading.
Moreover, North Star Recycling has built a full-chain system of ‘recycling – cascade utilization – regeneration utilization,’ and established Qingdao’s first demonstration plant for retired power battery recycling and utilization. A 30,000-tonne cascade utilization line, a 10,000-tonne shredding and separation line, and a 2,000-tonne scrap electrode sheet shredding line operate continuously and efficiently, while the secondary resources comprehensive utilization laboratory produces frequent results. With its solid strength, the project was successfully listed among the compliant enterprises in the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s ‘Industry Standard Conditions for Comprehensive Utilization of Waste Power Batteries from New Energy Vehicles’ (Fifth Batch), becoming a key project of Qingdao’s ‘zero-waste city’ and a key project of the ’14th Five-Year Plan’ circular economy plan. It provides an industry-level demonstration model for the construction of Chengyang District’s ‘zero-waste city’ and consolidates the core foundation for regional hazardous waste resource utilization.
In recent years, in the process of building a ‘zero-waste city’ in Chengyang District, Qingdao, Shandong Province, technology empowerment and targeted services have become the twin engines driving the region’s green transformation. From the high-value utilization of emerging industrial waste to the ‘burden relief’ of hazardous waste management for micro and small enterprises, Chengyang District uses an ‘enterprise practice + departmental escort’ model to bring together the concerted force of green development across the whole region.
The photo shows staff from the Chengyang Branch of the Qingdao Municipal Ecology and Environment Bureau providing on-site assistance and guidance to help the enterprise standardize hazardous waste management. Photo by Sui He.
Promoting the construction of a ‘zero-waste city’ requires both enterprises breaking through difficulties through technological innovation and the precise services of the ecological environment department,’ introduced a responsible person from the Chengyang Branch of the Qingdao Municipal Ecology and Environment Bureau. Grounded in the region’s industrial reality, the Chengyang Branch has built a multi-dimensional, three-dimensional support system for ‘zero-waste’ construction. For enterprises with an industry-leading role such as North Star Recycling, it establishes a ‘one enterprise, one policy’ special guidance mechanism, assisting them in optimizing the hazardous waste resource utilization process and promoting the transformation of technological achievements into industry benchmarks. For the numerous, scattered micro and small enterprises, it focuses on their common pain points of ‘small waste output, weak professional capacity, and high management costs,’ carrying out unified hazardous waste management and ‘lightening the burden’ for micro and small enterprises through process design.
Source of this article: China Environment News
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