Fifteen years ago, during an inspection tour in Anji County, General Secretary Xi Jinping for the first time put forward the scientific conclusion that "Clear waters and green mountains are as valuable as mountains of gold and silver, implying that lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets if the advantages of ecological environment can be transformed into advantages of ecological economy such as ecological agriculture, ecological industry, ecological tourism, etc. On January 21, 2020, during his visit to Yunnan, General Secretary Xi Jinping once again proposed that “ the idea that clear waters and green mountains are as valuable as mountains of gold and silver shall be firmly rooted in our mind in order to forever win the three battles for protection of blue sky, clear water and pure land ”. In the 14th Five-Year Plan, Secretary Xi’s "Two-Mountain" theory once again was ascended to a new height with increased investment and control cast in environmental protection and multiple policies issued to encourage the upgrade of environmental protection technologies.

According to statistics, the sludge produced in the sewage treatment process of urban sewage treatment plants will exceed 60 million tons this year. Together with the sludge and nutrient by-products from industrial sewage treatment, the total amount of sludge is enormously huge. Currently, the disposal cost for this part of  sludge is quite high as they are mainly disposed through sanitary landfill, desiccation for incineration, composing for field fertilizer, etc. Meanwhile, improper handling will lead to serious secondary pollution. According to the investigation, 30-50% carbon source, 30-45% nitrogen and about 90% phosphorus in sewage are transferred into the biological sludge. These elements are also the basic components of protein and other nutrients. Can they be recycled for resourceful utilization?

Charoen Pokphand Group (hereinafter referred to as the “CP Group”) is one of those exclusively foreign-owned enterprises that first entered to China, and particularly has made outstanding contribution to leading the healthy development of the agricultural and animal husbandry food industry. It is a pioneer of technology development in planting, feed, breeding, slaughtering, food processing and other industries, and also the practitioner of ecological agriculture and ecological industry. CP group has currently established hundreds of enterprises and plants in China with large amount of biological sludge and nutrient byproducts produced in the wastewater treatment systems of its food processing plants, and the CP management has long been paying close attention to technological options to recycle the nutrient wastes for resourceful utilization. “Our plants take the national and the public interests as our top priority during operation, and put social responsibility in the first place of our task list. By using iCell’s industrial and international leading bio-technology, our plants will achieve successful production of the Single Cell Protein (hereinafter referred to as the “SCP”), a feed ingredient to be used in our own feed mills, through resourceful utilization of organic process wastewater discharged from our food plants with clean and purified water effluent recycled back to the workshops for rinsing and washing, which will not only eliminate pollution, reduce our carbon footprint and the operating cost, realize a profound dual-circulation of nutrients and water but also will well practise CP’s operation principle - benefiting the country, benefiting the people and benefiting the enterprises. The Agreement between CP Henning and iCell will bring synergistic development towards a win-win outcome to us both parties, and serve as a solid witness of our company’s fulfillment to social responsibility”, said Ms. Li Sumei, COO of CP Henning.

iCell is a high-tech enterprise with global proprietary patented technologies. Currently, it has been cooperating with many leading enterprises in the food industry to produce SCP through using organic wastewater discharged from their food production processes. Mr. Mark Rottmann, CEO of iCell, also participated in the signing ceremony through online conference call and indicated “With CP, a leading conglomerate in animal nutrition industry, we highly look forward to the cooperation with them to achieve resourceful utilization of waste nutrients from CP plants and meanwhile create a novel and sustainable source of SCP proteins for CP feed mills. This is a marvelous milestone. Together we will make joint contribution to the feeding of 2 billion more people in the world by 2050, and find a sustainable ‘food source’ for ‘Kitchen of the World’”. In addition, the two sides has made a lot of exchanges over technologies and new ideas at the strategic cooperation meeting with common values shared and other cooperation opportunities found.

For the past few years, China has issued a number of policies to increase support for environmental protection management, and through financial support, tax incentives and other means to encourage domestic enterprises to independently research and develop internationally advanced technologies with independent intellectual property rights for treatment of organic waste in sewage; further increase the total amount of investment in environmental protection with the aim of improving the marketization, standardization and modernization of the construction and operation of sewage treatment projects. The support of national policies will lay a good foundation for the sustainable and healthy development of water pollution treatment industry. It is reported that iCell will carry out cooperation with aquatic processing plants in Sweden, USA, Mexico and other countries, and involve iCell technology to develop a land-based recirculating aquaculture system (LB-RAS), which helps develop its deep fusion with the aquatic industry and significantly reduce the industry's carbon footprint.

China also encourages enterprises to carry out more in-depth cooperation to further facilitate the improvement of the industrial economy and development level of China's agricultural industry and to build an integrated agricultural environmental ecological chain, and jointly take advantage of their proprietary intellectual property rights to create renewable resources, thus carrying out win-win cooperation in the aspects of economy, environmental protection and production process, constantly producing sustainable agricultural products with reduced costs, and realizing the creative inheritance of traditional Chinese agricultural culture. China is making increasing investment in the research and development of environmental protection with the sewage treatment technology improved rapidly so as to better help scale the new height of the “Two-Mountain” theory proposed by General Secretary Xi.

On-site signing ceremony

About iCell

iCell (Shanghai) Sustainable Nutrition Co., Ltd. is a high-tech company with patented technologies in environment, biology and nutrition, and owns more than 50 invention patents covering major economic entities of the world. iCell technology has innovatively achieved the resource utilization of lost nutrients in wastewater for feed protein production with effluent water clean and recyclable at the same time, thus providing a dual closed-loop solution for nutrition and water issues in the whole food industry chain for partners. The commercial implementation of iCell technology has been proven that it can significantly reduce operating costs and environmental risks for partners, promote synergistic development across multiple industries and fields, and achieve multi-wins in the aspects of nutrition, environment and economy.  

www.iCellSustainable.com/en

About CP Henning

Chia Tai Henning Modern Agricultural Technology Co., Ltd. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Charoen Pokphand Group in China. It is responsible for the construction, upgrading and transformation, operation support and management of the enterprises in CP Group's agriculture and animal husbandry section. CP Group is a multinational conglomerate. Up to now, CP Group has set up nearly 600 enterprises in China, making it one of the largest agricultural and animal husbandry enterprises in China and even in the world.

www.cpgroup.cn