The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on waste-to-energy and waste-to-material industry in China

The COVID-19 pandemic created enormous uncertainty for achieving the sustainable development goals in waste management. China implemented a number of new policies recently to encourage waste-to-energy (WTE) and waste-to-material (WTM) industry, which was also impacted by the spread of COVID-19, while the impact on the solid waste industry was merely discussed. In this work, the quarter-level financial statement data of thirty listed companies in Chinese Stock Market were analyzed by applying ARIMA intervention analysis, moreover, a system dynamic model was established for examining the impacting pathway of the pandemic. Main results are: (1) the total annual turnover of total solid waste industry increased by 28.2 times in recent 14 years, however, the estimated turnover of solid waste industry in 2020 dropped around 55.8 billion CNY; (2) the WTE industry kept growing (+21%), the WTM industry dropped significantly (−28%), while the waste disposal industry and other solid waste industry varied slightly (−10% and +9%), comparing their turnovers in 2019 and 2020; (3) the average trade-prices of the secondary materials during the COVID-19 pandemic were only 43.4%–85.8% of the maximum price from 2017 to 2019, resulting in the decline of the WTM industry. Considering a possible sluggish growth of the solid waste industry, the waste separation and zero waste programs in China may meet non-trivial challenges in the future. Policy implications are put forward, such as quantitative simulating the long-term impact, increasing investment and incentive on waste recycling, and building an internal circulation system for waste management.