Beijing Yingchuang Recycling Co Ltd was founded in 2008 with the desire to modernise and make more efficient Beijing's waste recycling system. The company manufactures and operates intelligent PET bottle recycling machines and properly recycles the waste bottles it recovers into recycled materials. The company says it will only work with formal recycling facilities that are approved by the government and meet environmental standards.
  
  The company is part of Yingchuang Recycling Resources Ltd, one of the few companies in China that can produce high quality recycled bottle-grade polyester chips, and Coca-Cola is also their customer.

Although statistics show that Beijing produces 150,000-200,000 tonnes of plastic waste bottles each year, Yingchuang has difficulty in obtaining sufficient quantities of raw materials, as informal recyclers divert a large amount of raw materials. Liu Xuesong, deputy general manager of Yingchuang, told Plastics News that it was to solve this problem that he started the business in the first place.
  
  "We encountered a bottleneck right at the beginning and were unable to obtain enough raw materials. Our parent plant had a capacity of 50,000 tonnes of PET bottles per year, but the capacity utilisation rate was less than half. There wasn't enough raw material and we couldn't procure enough volume."
  
  So Liu Xuesong and the other two co-founders, company president Yang Guang and general manager Chang Tao, started the company to help parent company Yingchuang obtain more raw materials.
  
  The three visionary industrialists, graduates of the China Europe International Business School EMBA, had a common goal: to bring the recycling industry into the IT era. Speaking in the institute's alumni publication, Yang Guangxiang expressed his desire to use IT solutions to take the manufacturing and environmental industries to new heights.
  
  The trio decided to place bottle recycling machines in public areas that are inaccessible to scrap dealers, such as airports, metro stations, schools and hospitals. Initially they planned to source recycling machines from suppliers, but eventually they realised they had to develop them themselves. In late 2012, with the help of a state-owned subsidiary of the National Development and Reform Commission, the first four machines were placed in underground stations in central Beijing.
  
  Liu Xuesong says the first recycling machines are undoubtedly work-in-progress. "The very first recycling machines had many problems. We had to stand by to make sure they worked properly. Now the recycling machines have been updated to their fifth version and there are 1,323 Yingchuang recycling machines being used by 150,000 people in Beijing to recycle waste bottles."
  
  The recycling machines have attracted attention and news coverage in local and national media has helped to promote their initiative. One of the most attractive aspects of the Yingchuang recycling machines for consumers is that they are nearly double the price paid by informal waste sources. For each PET bottle, consumers receive a steady RMB 0.10. This compares to the average RMB 0.06 per bottle paid by regular scrap recyclers, depending on the fluctuation of oil prices.
  
  The company plans to undergo rapid expansion. They plan to install 3,500 recycling machines in Beijing by the end of this year, increasing to 5,000 by the end of next year. Liu Xuesong said, "We hope to focus on Beijing for now to provide a template for other cities to follow." By the end of the year, Yingchuang will have also installed 500 recycling machines in Guangdong, Shandong, Chongqing and Shanxi.
  
  As the company uses automated recycling machines to monitor waste bottle collection, it has access to a lot of valuable data.
  
  Liu Xuesong opened an app on his phone and showed detailed charts. One of the charts shows the number of waste bottles collected by the Yingchuang recycling machines to date. Since the company launched its first recycling machine at the end of 2012, it has recycled more than 7 million used bottles. Another chart shows the daily recycling figures. app also shows who and where the recycling takes place. Some people use smart cards to get paid, others via mobile phones.
  
  These figures provide convenience for consumers and are even more attractive to big brand manufacturers and governments. The recycling machine captures information by scanning the barcode of used bottles and can also provide a graph of current trends in use and recycling. For example, specific statistics for a particular brand. Liu Xuesong said that PCG now provides this data free of charge to the government and to brand owners who order advertising space on the recycling machine.
  
  PCG can also use the system to track where waste bottles are being transported for recycling. Liu Xuesong says: "We use the internet to monitor recycling and make sure they go to a proper factory for non-polluting processing."
  
  The challenges facing Liu Xuesong and colleagues are enormous, but they are confident that if they can overcome them, success will mean a lot.
  
  She says: "No recycling company in China has a (comprehensive) recycling system. This is our biggest advantage at the moment. It is difficult to recycle and set up recycling systems. But the opportunities in this area are also the greatest. So we think that if we can set up this system, it will add significant value to the company. This will be our core value because even the government cannot set up such a recycling system in Chinese cities."
  
  Liu Xuesong and her team also plan to expand recycling to other materials, including other types of plastic, paper, glass, metal, consumer electronics and textiles. Users can use a smartphone app to contact recyclers to collect their scrap. This will bring in a lot of the raw materials we need," says Liu Xuesong. The recycling machine is expected to help recycle some of the raw materials and the door-to-door service will recycle the rest, so I reckon the [total] volume will be very significant by 2016."
  
  Liu Xuesong said the company is looking for solutions both upstream and downstream. They are also developing new product lines to add value as their raw material inventory grows. Without value-add, it's hard to make a profit," she says. So we recycle our waste and write stories about it. That way they become interesting and value-added." Liu Xuesong says Yingchuang is working with Japanese designers to develop a line of stationery made from recycled PET.
  
  The pressure the three of them faced turned into motivation to succeed. Liu Xuesong says they hope to become a model for other industrialists.
  
  "It's hard to make money in this business. We are very concerned about the environment. [But] if it's not profitable, it's not a good role model because people will think that protecting the environment is hard to do and won't want to go down that path of development."