Environmental protection is a major issue facing the domestic cable industry
In recent years, discussions on environmentally friendly cables or green cables have been heated. In fact, for today, environmental protection is no longer a technology, but will become a basic requirement. This is not only the cable industry. When any industry selects materials or products, the first requirement is green products, otherwise the project cannot be used, and even if it uses such non-environmentally friendly materials or products, it is difficult to pass the country. The relevant department's inspection.
At present, the average utilization rate of wire and cable equipment in China is around 30%, and the utilization rate of foreign companies' equipment is often kept at 70%. An expert pointed out that the reasons leading to the low utilization rate of China's electrical equipment are: excess capacity, and secondly, environmental protection issues that wire and cable companies often overlook. For the first reason, overcapacity cannot be solved by any company alone. For the second environmental issue, each company can face it alone. In fact, in recent years, the sales share of environmentally friendly wire and cable products has expanded dramatically, and ordinary wire and cable and flame-retardant wires and cables have been unable to compete with them.
As we all know, green wire and cable products are the carriers of circular economy. The key to achieving green products is to start with design. The green design or ecological design is based on the environment. Using the product life cycle assessment technology, many local design methods in the contemporary design method are unified as a whole to achieve overall optimization. Cable manufacturers in developed countries such as Europe, the United States and Japan have always adhered to the concept of green environmental protection, grasped green design from the source, and resolutely avoided the generation of harmful substances during the production process. China's wire and cable companies have just started in product eco-design, and relevant government departments and local agencies have also made relevant regulations to urge enterprises to implement. At present, two cities in Beijing and Shanghai have banned the use of PVC non-environmental protection wire and cable, and railways, communications and other departments have also issued specific regulations. Subsequently, in the next few years, the building, transportation, transportation, and communications departments and the power supply departments of all large and medium-sized cities in China will implement the requirements for a complete ban on the use of non-environmental wires and cables.
On the other hand, in China's wire and cable industry, most of the wire and cable production process has serious pollution; enterprises in the manufacturing, use, and disposal processes emit large quantities of toxic substances such as dioxin, lead, and halogens. Therefore, under the general policy of China's introduction of green energy development, China's wire and cable companies should take the initiative to learn from foreign cable companies and learn from the environmental protection measures they have adopted for their own use. At the same time, we should also note that new materials are the core of environmentally friendly cables, and ensuring the environmental performance of materials used in R&D is the top priority in promoting environmentally friendly cable production. In the production of wire and cable, the raw material cost accounts for more than 80% of the product's production cost, of which copper, aluminum, steel core, rubber, plastics, and sheathing are the main raw material costs, which requires the wire and cable companies to design Specializing in products, saving raw materials, and developing new environmentally-friendly materials.
In addition, the development of environmental protection cables is also an important part of building a recycling economy for China's wire and cable industry. The current stage is an important stage for the development of industrialization and urbanization in China. Wire and cable companies must seize the strategic opportunity for the development of the power industry, vigorously develop a circular economy, and obtain the largest economic output with the least possible resource consumption and the lowest possible environmental cost. The goal of “sustained reduction, reuse, and recycling” is to achieve sustainable development with minimum waste emissions.
Then, in terms of the specific characteristics of China's wire and cable industry, which aspects should be carried out? The author believes that the first step should be to start from the elimination of cold rolling mills and black copper rods. Obviously, the production process of rolling 8 black copper rods with cold rolling mills is backward, and its black copper rods have high oxide content, low electrical conductivity, poor performance, tensile weight ratio, consumables, energy consumption, and serious pollution. Must be eliminated. Secondly, aluminum rare earth optimization technology should be actively promoted. At present, the production of electrical aluminum rods using the continuous casting and rolling process has become quite popular in China, and the performance is good. However, the equipment still remains at the level of development in the early 1970s, and there are not many technological innovations. Therefore, wire and cable companies should actively promote China's unique aluminum rare earth optimization processing technology, and use the introduction of some key special equipment and technology to add aluminum-zirconium alloy, transform the melting aluminum coal-fired furnace into a molten aluminum fuel or natural gas furnace, all eliminate melting Coal-fired fumes and smoke emissions from aluminum coal-fired furnaces. At the same time, set up a flue gas filtration device to purify the flue gas, improve the emission quality, increase the yield, reduce the cost, increase the working temperature of the wire from 70°C to 150°C, and increase the flow rate by 1.6 times.
Finally, to create a recycling economy in the wire and cable industry also requires companies to independently innovate and develop high-performance wire and cable special equipment. At present, the key production equipment for wire and cable leading products is compared with foreign advanced equipment, and the gap in technology level is still very large, mainly reflected in low productivity, low degree of automation, high energy consumption, poor reliability, and has not yet met the needs of industry development. , digestion and absorption are seriously lagging behind. Once the technical level, performance and reliability of wire and cable special equipment are improved, it will have an important positive effect on improving the quality of wire and cable products, production efficiency and material utilization. Therefore, companies should spare no effort to introduce technology, independent innovation and development of high performance, high-level wire and cable equipment, in order to create a recycling economy of wire and cable industry services. At the same time, it should also pay attention to strengthening recycling of discarded wire and cable products. In the production process of wires and cables, the company must directly recycle and reuse the remaining corners. Industry insiders suggested setting up a professional “polyvinyl chloride” waste recycling plant that will be processed at fixed points and used for other purposes to avoid secondary pollution.
Therefore, environmental protection is a big lesson. Regardless of the operation of the wire and cable manufacturing companies, or from the development of the domestic wire and cable industry, and even from the perspective of China’s industrial development, the wire and cable industry will play an important supporting role as an important supporting industry for the national economy. . It can be said that the strength of the Chinese cable industry reflects the strength of China's entire industry. (Shanghai Cable Institute Exhibition)