This is the English edition. The article body below is the publisher's English rendering of the original Chinese article; figures, license numbers and institutional names follow the original.
Who takes the old unit at the counter
When a customer orders a new appliance in store, the old one is usually taken away by the delivery crew at the same time as the new unit is installed. Some retailers instead contract the collection to a third-party service that picks up at an agreed time.
This single step decides which chain the unit enters. Units that go into a brand or chain-store channel leave a record behind. Units handed to a roving buyer at the door usually cannot be traced afterwards. The price difference may be only a few dozen yuan, but the disposal path is entirely different.
Reverse logistics: from store to consolidation hub
Old appliances do not travel straight from the shop to a dismantling plant. They are first gathered at a regional hub and stacked by category, condition and whether parts are missing. The hub exists to build volume: a single store collects a handful a day, which will not cover a truck, so units wait until a full load is available.
This is the middle tier of the three-tier collection network. Producer-run or commissioned systems, retailer reverse collection and social collection points all converge at consolidation before moving on to licensed dismantlers. The denser the network, the higher the share of units that stay inside the formal channel.
Sorting inside the hub
Sorting answers three questions: can it be reused, does it contain hazardous parts, and which category does it belong to. Presentable units may go to second-hand circulation; incomplete or damaged ones go to dismantling; anything with a battery, mercury backlight or refrigerant is marked separately so it is not broken during storage.
- Reusability — complete units with all accessories are assessed for resale first.
- Hazardous parts — batteries, lamps and refrigerant are labelled and stored apart.
- Category — palletised and labelled by type to avoid a second sort downstream.
- Missing parts — absent compressors or mainboards are recorded because they affect pricing.
Sorting quality carries downstream. A mixed load forces the dismantler to re-sort on arrival, and that cost comes back through the recycling price. A hub that palletises by category and labels properly makes the whole handover far quicker.
The dismantling plant stage
On arrival, units are weighed, registered and checked against category before entering the appropriate line: refrigerators go to refrigerant extraction and shredding, air conditioners to refrigerant recovery and heat-exchanger dismantling, televisions to display separation, washing machines to motor and drum teardown. This stage is bounded by both qualification and capacity: processing certificate E1310261 runs to 8 January 2027, and approved capacity is 15,500 tonnes a year. Anything above the approved volume counts neither toward formal dismantling statistics nor toward subsidy.
Outputs are split into iron, copper, aluminium, plastic and glass, with waste circuit boards routed through the hazardous waste channel. The documents generated here — weighbridge tickets, dismantling ledgers, output sales contracts and transfer manifests — are what later proves the unit really was processed properly.
Three points where the chain breaks
The first break is at collection. Community buyers offer flexible prices and residents value convenience, so units slip out of the formal channel at exactly this point. The second is transport: a cross-region movement without a handover note leaves no way to trace who held the load midway.
The third is paperwork. A store that takes a unit without registering it, or a hub that ships without an outgoing document, produces a mismatch at the plant. Once the paper trail breaks, none of the earlier compliance can be proven. There is also a hard constraint behind the paperwork: waste circuit boards fall under HW49 in the 2025 edition of the National Catalogue of Hazardous Wastes and may only move through licensed channels. Hand any segment of the chain to an unlicensed party and every handover note before it becomes worthless.
Practical notes
- Ask for a collection receipt when trading in, naming category, unit count and the collecting entity.
- Prefer store-run or brand-official collection over unlicensed door-to-door buyers.
- Remove batteries and empty the refrigerator before handover to reduce contamination in transit.
- For corporate replacement programmes, file the old-asset list separately from the new purchase order.
- If assets must be written off, obtain a disposal certificate from the dismantler and reconcile unit counts.