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The Hebei Provincial Development and Reform Commission and the Hebei Provincial Department of Finance have issued the notice on the 2026 Implementation Plan for Large-Scale Equipment Renewal and Consumer Goods Trade-Ins. The section on "smooth recycling and reuse channels" bears directly on the renewable resources recycling and processing industry.

Recycling Network Development

  • Draw up the 15th Five-Year Plan for renewable resources recycling and continue building and improving the renewable resources recycling system.
  • Support supply-and-marketing system recycling enterprises in various forms of joint ventures and cooperation with influential state-owned and private enterprises, cultivating corporate groups that operate across regions, sectors, and ownership types.
  • Build and upgrade a number of specialized, standardized, and green renewable resources sorting centers; consolidate social recycling outlets through acquisition, franchising, and leasing.
  • Form an integrated county (district), township, and village renewable resources recycling and utilization network.

Industry and Supervision

  • Encourage the reasonable extension of deep-processing industrial chains for scrap steel, scrap non-ferrous metals, waste paper, and waste plastics; support green, mechanized, and intelligent upgrading of renewable resources processing and utilization projects.
  • Strengthen ecological environment law enforcement and supervision, and crack down hard on illegal activities in recycling and dismantling.
  • Continue implementing and supervising the "reverse invoicing" policy, under which resource recycling enterprises issue invoices to individual sellers of scrapped products.

Consumer Subsidy Rules

Appliance trade-ins cover six categories of Grade-1 energy- or water-efficiency products — refrigerators, washing machines, televisions, air conditioners, computers, and water heaters — subsidized at 15% of the final sale price, capped at RMB 1,500 per item; digital and smart products (mobile phones, tablets, smart watches and bands, smart glasses, each capped at RMB 6,000 per unit) receive the same 15% subsidy, capped at RMB 500 per item.

What It Means for Processing Enterprises

The downward extension of the recycling network (county-township-village) will markedly change the supply structure; the standardized upgrading of sorting centers means the room for "small, scattered outlets" is being squeezed, while qualified enterprises that can enter the system are better positioned to take on policy-driven supply. Stronger enforcement, in turn, targets unlicensed dismantling directly.

What Each of the Three Tiers Does

"Three-in-one" does not mean blanketing the map with outlets; each tier solves a specific link:

  • County tier: sorting and consolidation — takes supply flowing up from townships, performs sorting, pre-dismantling processing, and baling, and concentrates supply to processing enterprises or deep-processing plants. This tier determines whether regional supply can reach scale.
  • Township tier: transit and rough sorting — aggregates scattered supply from village collection points, does initial sorting and temporary storage, and solves the transport economics of the "village to county" leg.
  • Village tier: touchpoints and aggregation — collection points set up in existing locations such as supply-and-marketing cooperative outlets, community service stations, and property management offices, covering the first mile of aggregation.

The efficiency bottleneck of the three-tier network usually lies not in the number of village touchpoints but in temporary storage conditions at township transit stations. Used appliances are bulky, and equipment containing refrigerants or batteries needs separate storage; without adequate space at the transit station, supply stalls at this tier.

How the Supply Structure Will Change

Once the network extends downward, supply entering formal channels will shift from "concentrated trade-in recovery" to "daily scattered collection," with two direct effects on processing enterprises:

  • More mixed categories — equipment recovered on the rural side is older and more brand-fragmented, so dismantling processes must adapt more than for urban batch supply.
  • Smaller batches, higher frequency — transport and storage take a larger share of cost, the room to dilute costs through scale shrinks, and consolidation at transit points becomes necessary to offset it.

Together these two points mean: whether an enterprise can capture the supply released by policy depends on sorting and storage capacity, not just dismantling capacity.

Source

Hebei Provincial Development and Reform Commission: hbdrc.hebei.gov.cn.