lssue date: 2008.03.25

Report by Dongjia from Xinhua agency: There are a lot of rubbish from our daily life and being thrown away easily, while the development of recycle economy can exchange the value of these wastes and better for environmental protection and energy saving. Premier Wen Jiabao makes clear concerning comments in his government work report.
Yucheng city, Shandong province
In most villages of China, the corncobs are always burned by farmer, while in Yucheng city of Shandong province, these waste corncobs are used by the new technology as a key factor in the advanced recycle economic industry chain.
Vice general manager of Shandong Futaste pharmaceutical co. Mr. Xie Fakong said: Different from former waste corncobs, now we can use them to further progress Xylitol, one side it can bring a considerable profit and the other side it can also benefit the farmers and same time protect the environment.
Xylitol is one kind of functional sugar alcohol, and it is low calorie, good taste and healthy, mainly uses in food industry for health care and also chemical & pharmaceutical industry. Xylitol industry is a brand new business in the new century and is well known now for one of its product “Xylitol sugar-free gum”.
R&D director of Shandong Futaste pharmaceutical co. Mr. Wang Chengfu said: We don’t have very complicated production process, what we do is to hydrolyze the corncobs by acid and thus separate the polychrome xylose to be single-molecule, and finally get this kind of white crystalline product after a series of purifying process.    
Mr. Wang also introduces the recycle usage of the waste from the processes. He said: the production amount of Xylitol from corncob is quite high, we can get nearly 1 ton of Xylitol from 8 tons of corncob. In the workshop area of Futaste co., reporter saw 4 big corn-heaps and each is about several ten thousands of tons. The Futaste staff told the reporter that these corncobs are purchased from the farmers about RMB500 per ton and every purchasing season time you can see a long queue nearly 1 km of trucks carrying corncobs waiting outside Futaste gate.
Mr. Xie introduces that Futaste will consume about 200,000 m.t. of corncobs, purchasing from villages nearby and also far away over 100 km, it can bring about RMB120 million income to these farmers.    
The Xylitol is one of the product from the corncob, furthermore the waste residues from Xylitol production can also be used, like the Xylose residue, furfural residue. Reporter finds out during the interview, all these residues are sold to Tongyu Heat & Electricity co. under price about RMB 30 per ton, and then are used as the fuel for electricity generation.
Vice general manager of Shandong Tongyu heat & electricity co. Mr. Zhang Yuanli said: This is the storage for the residues, we store the residues purchased from 3 or 4 factories all here and then to be dried and burned under proportion of 8:2 according to the national standard. We normally can consume the residues about 350 tons per day.
Before the corncob residue is the pure waste, for example Futaste will make about 280,000 tons of residue annually and will cause concerning transportation and storage cost about RMB 1.5 million to deal with these residues, while same time also cause terrible environmental pollution. Now the 600,000 tons of corncob residues from about 10 local factories can be used in place of coal to generate about 70 million degrees of electric power, and same time reduce the discharge of sulphide and carbon dioxide gas, and further more the ash from burning residues can be used as good fertilizer.    
In addition, because of the good reduction of sulfur dioxide air discharge, the British carbon resource management co. makes a trade contract with Tongyu co. for a seven years “Reduction awards of waste air discharge”, and thus Tongyu gets a foreign exchange income about 2 million US dollars annually.
Mr. Zhang Yuanli of Tongyu said: We have signed a contract with British carbon resource co. on the using of a new boiler, agreeing with that every reduction of sulfur dioxide air discharge by this boiler can get an award about USD 9.5 per ton, and we plan to start using the new boiler this March.
From all above actions, the corncob process industry chain successfully realizes a full recycle “From land and back to land”.