China releases draft plan for digital transformation in hazardous waste management 
China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment on Jan. 18, 2022, released a draft circular on a plan to promote digital transformation in hazardous waste environmental management to solicit public comments, which were accepted through Jan. 30.
The circular contains measures to advance digital transformation and intelligent systems for environmental management of hazardous waste. Here is an overview.
Digital transformation in hazardous waste environmental management
- Companies that generated 10 tons or more of hazardous waste in the previous year must create an electronic hazardous waste management record book and keep a record of hazardous waste on the national information platform.
- Each manifest for hazardous waste transport is assigned an identification number centrally by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment to associate hazardous waste on a manifest with its corresponding hazardous waste management plan submitted to the national information platform by the concerned company.
- When hazardous waste is transported between provinces, the ecology and environmental departments of the origin and destination provinces process related documents on the national platform so that all the processes involved are paperless.
- Companies handling hazardous waste must create a hazardous waste handling record book and report their handling of hazardous waste, such as disposal, on the national information platform.
- Exporters of hazardous waste must provide export information through their hazardous waste management plans on the national information platform.
Intelligent hazardous waste management
- Local departments of ecology and environments keep track of hazardous waste in their jurisdictions throughout the management of the waste using IoT technologies, such as surveillance cameras, electronic tags and smart platform scales.
- Based on a national plan, a pilot program is conducted for a new model of digital management of waste lead-acid batteries. In this program, information on the disposal of waste lead-acid batteries is recorded on a specific platform that is part of the national information platform.
The full text of the draft circular (in simplified Chinese) is available at
https://www.mee.gov.cn/xxgk2018/xxgk/xxgk06/202201/t20220119_967527.html
