BEIJING, Dec. 30 (Xinhua) -- China's first million-tonne-level near-zero carbon steel production line went fully operational in late December in Zhanjiang, south China's Guangdong Province, marking a new milestone in the green, low-carbon transformation of traditional industries.

In 2025, China has continued to advance green development, leveraging sci-tech innovation to make industrial production more environment-friendly -- particularly in traditional sectors like steel and chemicals, which were once highly polluting and energy-intensive. The green upgrade of these traditional industries is crucial for building a sustainable economy.

GREEN STEEL PRODUCTION

Among the green transformations seen in various traditional industries, breakthroughs in the steel sector stand out as particularly noteworthy as they are crucial to China's emissions reduction efforts.

Operated by a subsidiary of Baosteel, which is one of China's leading steelmakers, this production line comprises a hydrogen-based shaft furnace with an annual capacity of 1 million tonnes, alongside an electric furnace and a continuous casting line.

The new project has adopted advanced hydrogen metallurgy and electric smelting technology. By replacing traditional coke with hydrogen, it has moved away from the traditional energy-intensive and highly polluting process, charting a new course for the steel industry to break its fossil fuel dependency.

The production line has validated high-hydrogen smelting conditions, with the metallization rate of its direct reduced iron (DRI) meeting expectations. It will primarily utilize DRI and scrap steel as raw materials to produce low-carbon-emissions slabs, leveraging existing rolling facilities to manufacture low-carbon and near-zero-carbon steel products.

Compared to conventional steel production lines, the project is projected to achieve a carbon reduction of 50 percent to 80 percent.

"This near-zero-carbon steel production line can cut carbon emissions by over 3.14 million tonnes annually, which is equivalent to planting 2,000 square kilometers of forests," said project leader Wang Hongliang.

ENVIRONMENT-FRIENDLY CHEMICALS

The green upgrade in the field of chemicals is reflected clearly in the efficiency of production processes and the reduction of pollutants.

In October 2025, a research team led by Zhang Xiaheng at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences' Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, published a discovery in Nature that would make the chemical industry greener, safer and more cost-effective.

The team introduced a novel strategy utilizing N-nitroamine-mediated direct deamination, enabling the efficient and safe conversion of aromatic amine compounds. This breakthrough opens a more economical and environmentally friendly technical pathway to synthesizing drugs like cancer medications.

Aromatic amines are fundamental building units for the chemical synthesis of drugs and pesticides. They are synthesized using established methods dating back to 1884. The typical synthesis process carries explosion risks and generates substantial amounts of copper-containing waste, posing challenges to environmental and process safety.

Estimates suggest that aromatic amine facilities that use these existing methods often incur safety-related costs for explosion-proof walls, remote operating systems and emergency quench tanks, which can be six to 20 times higher than those of ordinary chemical synthesis facilities.

The new pathway not only safely utilizes inexpensive and readily available chemical reagents to produce aromatic amines, but also significantly reduces heavy metal waste generation, cutting costs associated with safety and pollution treatment.

Kilogram-scale production has been successfully achieved using the new method, demonstrating its potential for scaled application. The team is now testing 100-kilogram scale production in collaboration with partner companies. According to estimates from these partners, the technology could reduce the production costs of drug intermediates by 40 percent to 50 percent and enable large-scale green production.

WASTE TO ENERGY

In addition to value-creating industrial production, China's green technology is also capable of turning environmental burdens into new resources. For example, green upgrades to waste incinerators have transformed waste into electricity while generating less pollution.

Waste treatment faces a series of challenges, including complex composition, fluctuating calorific values, difficulty in controlling harmful substances, the need for stable and continuous operations, and a heavy reliance on manual operations.

China ENFI, a subsidiary of China Metallurgical Group Corporation, has established a new-generation waste process model for power generation. Compared to conventional incineration methods, it is more reliable, environmentally friendly and efficient.

By integrating the industrial internet, big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, China ENFI has built an intelligent incineration system that can adapt, optimize, diagnose and learn independently, addressing the major challenges of efficiency, environmental protection, safety and costs.

The new technology has improved the effective utilization of heat from waste incineration, thereby increasing power generation efficiency and revenue, and has produced less pollution. The flue gas purification system, for example, has reduced the consumption of environmental agents such as slaked lime and urea by over 10 percent while meeting all environmental standards.

To tackle the difficulties of treating leachate, such as high pollutant concentration, complex composition, and unstable water quality and quantity, the new system adopts a control strategy based on smart monitoring, biochemical models, AI prediction and intelligent algorithms, reducing key indicators like chemical oxygen demand and ammonia nitrogen by over 30 percent.

The new technology has been successfully applied at waste incineration enterprises in provincial regions like Beijing, Hebei, Jiangxi, Hubei and Zhejiang. ■