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A few days ago, 10 departments including the State Forestry and Grassland Administration jointly issued the "Opinions on Accelerating the Innovation and Development of the Bamboo Industry." This document, which is regarded as a weather vane of the industry, clarifies the development goals of the national bamboo industry from two time nodes: by 2025, the total output value will exceed 700 billion yuan; by 2035, the total output value will exceed 1 trillion yuan.

Thanks to the strategy of "promoting one production with three production with two production", Fujian bamboo industry has achieved rapid development in recent years. The four indicators of the province's bamboo forest area, the number of bamboo industry employees, the total output value, and the amount of foreign exchange earned from exports rank first in the country.

In the context of sustainable development, bamboo, which has significant advantages in ecological and environmental protection, is constantly exploring new application scenarios. "Bamboo instead of wood" and "bamboo instead of plastic" have become new races for social capital. A bamboo leverages trillions of output value, which is the latest expectation of the market for the bamboo industry.

But only by overcoming the "roadblocks" such as high labor costs and limited levels of intensive processing, can Fujian's bamboo industry truly rank among the top racers on this imaginative track.

Bamboo processing leverages 80 billion yuan output value

The 50 mu bamboo forest in Lianwei, a bamboo farmer in Lantou Village, Xiaotao Town, Yong'an City, was once out of management, but now it has become the main source of income for the family. "According to the local market, the purchase price of a ton of bamboo is more than 700 yuan. Every year, by supplying raw materials for bamboo processing enterprises, you can earn 30 thousands or 40 thousands yuan, accounting for more than 60% of the annual income." Guan lianwei said that in addition to selling bamboo, many bamboo farmers in the village also started transportation or went to work in bamboo processing plants and became industrial workers. "a couple of couples earn more than 100,000 yuan a year in the processing plants".

However, before 2000, more than 7000 acres of bamboo hills in Rentao Village were allowed to grow barbarously for a long time. "There are few processing enterprises, the demand for bamboo is low, and the enthusiasm of bamboo farming mountain is naturally not high." Guan Lianwei said that the utilization rate of bamboo, which seems to be covered with treasures, was low in the early years. Digging bamboo shoots up the mountain and making bamboo weaving can be regarded as "making the best use of everything.

The rise of bamboo processing industry expands more possibilities of a piece of bamboo: bamboo can be used as floor, furniture and board, bamboo leaf extract can be made into health care products, bamboo fiber can be used in textile industry, bamboo scraps and processing waste can be calcined at high temperature to become bamboo charcoal... Relying on the rich resources of Phyllostachys pubescens, Yong'an City has formed an industrial cluster dominated by bamboo engineering board and bamboo board, bamboo incense core and bamboo mechanism charcoal, there are 206 forest and bamboo enterprises in the city, and the tax payment exceeded 0.1 billion yuan last year.

Yongan's leading bamboo industry enterprise, Yongqing Bamboo and Wood Industry Development Co., Ltd., Bayi Village, Fujian Province, has been using bamboo to produce container floors since the 1990 s. Early container floors were mostly tropical hardwoods, and cloned wood, which is mainly produced in Southeast Asia, was the main tree species. However, with the increasing shortage of wood resources, bamboo as a substitute has gradually become the darling of the market.

"The rise of the processing industry has driven the demand for bamboo." Last year, global demand for containers surged as a result of the outbreak, said Xu Xianhao, chairman of the company. The company, which focuses on the production of container floors, had sales of more than 1.6 billion yuan last year, nearly four times that of 2020. At present, Yongqing's factory in Xiaotao Town consumes nearly 700 tons of bamboo every day. Because of this, the local bamboo purchase price is much higher than the surrounding areas.

Driven by the processing industry, Zhushan has become a "golden mountain" in the eyes of bamboo farmers, and the bamboo forest that was once out of control has also turned to intensive cultivation. "Build mechanical tillage roads, repair cisterns, regularly chop grass for management and protection, and change from extensive application of compound fertilizer to application of organic fertilizer that is more ecologically friendly to the soil." Guan Lianwei said that through scientific management, the bamboo forest has not only increased its output, but also greatly improved its hardness and toughness, and the purchase price is naturally higher.

Taking bamboo processing as the starting point to promote the development of the whole industrial chain such as bamboo forest cultivation, bamboo shoot market and bamboo forest tourism is the development strategy of Fujian bamboo industry. "Fujian Phyllostachys pubescens forest area accounts for more than 1/3 of the country, ranking first in the country. We insist on 'promoting primary production with tertiary production' and continue to promote the development of the bamboo industry." Wu Qingliang, a fourth-level researcher at the Forestry Reform and Industrial Development Department of the Provincial Forestry Bureau, said that as early as 2016, the General Office of the Provincial Government issued the ''Notice on Seven Measures to Accelerate the Development of the Bamboo Industry'', and the provincial finance allocated 0.1 billion yuan each year to support the bamboo industry. development.

This document, known as the "Seven Bamboo Articles", focuses on supporting the research and development and introduction of key technologies and equipment in the bamboo industry, and the prying effect is obvious. During the five years from 2016 to 2020, the province has implemented a total of 413 deep processing projects of bamboo shoots and bamboos, driving a total investment of 1.793 billion billion yuan, building 6000 kilometers of Zhushan mechanic roads, and yielding more than 60000 mu of bamboo forests.

Data from the Provincial Forestry Bureau show that the total output value of the province's bamboo industry is 78.6 billion yuan in 2020, and this figure is expected to exceed 82 billion yuan in 2021. There are more than 2300 bamboo shoots and bamboo processing enterprises in the province, which have solved the employment of more than 200,000 workers and driven more than 150 million bamboo farmers to increase their income and become rich.

Green fashion gives birth to a new track of industry

After three years of technical research, the bamboo straw developed by Wuyishan Zhenghua Bamboo and Wood Products Co., Ltd. has finally achieved mass production and won orders from Japan and Southeast Asia. Company director Jiang Yimin is confident to open the domestic market as soon as possible.

Confidence comes from the "strictest plastic order". In 2020, China issued the "Opinions on Further Strengthening the Control of Plastic Pollution", and non-degradable disposable plastic straws were included in the first batch of plastic restrictions. As a substitute, paper straws began to appear in the public eye, but they were criticized for their poor use experience. Bamboo straws with anti-scald, durable and other performance advantages and more environmentally friendly, so it is expected to overtake in corners, and the market potential is huge. Jiang Yimin quoted a set of industry data: in 2019, before the "strictest plastic restriction order" was issued, the annual consumption of plastic straws nationwide was nearly 30000 tons, or about 46 billion.

Jiang Yimin has been engaged in bamboo processing for nearly 30 years. In 1997, he set up a factory in Tongmu Village, Xingcun Town, Wuyishan City, his hometown, to supply semi-finished bamboo blanks to bamboo processing enterprises in neighboring Zhejiang Province. After that, Jiang Yimin turned to the bamboo stick market and developed more than 300 products for different ingredients, occupying a place in the Japanese market. Under the green fashion, he set his sights on the field of "replacing plastic with bamboo.

"Plastic products will gradually withdraw from the home life series." Jiang Yimin believes that "replacing plastic with bamboo" has once again expanded the imagination of a bamboo. In addition to bamboo straws, bamboo knives and forks, bamboo toothbrushes, bamboo razors and other disposable fast-moving consumer goods are Zhenghua's current flagship products. Right now, Jiang Yimin also plans to introduce bamboo fiber recombination technology to develop disposable garbage bags.

Compared with "replacing plastic with bamboo", Fujian bamboo industry has been running on the track of "replacing wood with bamboo" for many years. In 2005, Zhenghe County Bamboo Enterprise Fujian Pinjiang Tea House Technology Co., Ltd. took bamboo tea trays as its entry point to test the market of "replacing wood with bamboo. But initially the market acceptance is not satisfactory. "At that time, bamboo tea trays produced in Fujian were cracked in 9 out of 10 in the northern region." Lu Xiaoyan, manager of the administrative department of the artisan company, said that bamboo itself has high content of moisture, starch and sugar, which is easy to be eaten and cracked by insects.

Now, after years of technical exploration, this problem has been solved. Bamboo treated by high temperature carbonization and other processes gets rid of inherent defects. Zhenghe also has the right to speak in the market segment of bamboo tea trays. The bamboo tea trays produced in the county every year account for nearly 80% of the national market share.

Subsequently, the artisan company began to expand its product categories to the field of bamboo furniture. But it is not easy to change ingrained consumption habits. "At the beginning, we benchmarked traditional wooden furniture and tried to be consistent with it in surface texture and color." Lu Xiaoyan said that after years of market cultivation, this situation has changed, and bamboo furniture has begun to enter the public eye from the niche market.

Chairs, tables, cabinets ...... in political harmony, "everything can be bamboo". A number of bamboo furniture enterprises, represented by artisans, have also begun to shift from single product sales to space customization. "We have put forward the concepts of bamboo space and bamboo study to provide customers with a full set of customized services including hard and soft outfits to create a full bamboo space." Lu Xiaoyan said that at present, bamboo space customization has been applied in the home stay and tooling markets. The next step will be to open up the home decoration market and provide families with bamboo product customization services for the whole house.

"Bamboo is made in three years, and bamboo shoots and bamboo are produced every year, and it is not restricted by felling. The business cycle is short and the economic benefit is high." Wu Qingliang said that as an ecological and environmental protection material, under the fashion of "replacing wood with bamboo" and "replacing plastic with bamboo", the bamboo industry is ushering in new development opportunities.

In 2020, Fujian Province will consume 0.957 billion bamboo roots, which is equivalent to replacing 9.25 million cubic meters of wood and cutting down 1.555 million mu of forest.

Call for innovation and development to break through the bottleneck of industry

The track has been set, racers are ready? The industry believes that to fully share the trillion market cake, there are many industrial bottlenecks to be broken.

Zhang Mingqiang, a bamboo farmer in Xiangyuan Village, Qianzhen Town, Zhenghe County, has been worried about the "difficulty of going down the mountain" of bamboo. "In political harmony, the purchase price of a ton of bamboo is more than 600 yuan, but the cost of cutting and transporting bamboo reaches more than 300 yuan." He said that at present, bamboo mining and transportation is still dominated by manpower, and the use of chainsaws, brush cutters, cableways and other machinery is quite limited. As labor costs continue to rise, the operating efficiency of bamboo farmers has been hovering at a low level.

Bamboo "down the mountain difficult" is the industry's common trouble. Wu Qingliang said that Fujian Zhushan is dominated by household contract management, the degree of large-scale operation is not high, and the degree of mechanical promotion and use is low. Due to the limited benefits, most bamboo farmers only operate Zhushan as a sideline, "especially some remote and inconvenient Zhushan, still rely on the sky for food and neglect management".

In this regard, Xie Zifang, deputy director of the Bamboo Industry Development Center of Zhenghe County, advocated promoting the moderate large-scale operation of bamboo forests and introducing social services. "Cultivate socialized service organizations for agricultural machinery, uniformly purchase machinery needed for bamboo forest management and harvesting and transportation, provide unified and standardized services for bamboo farmers in a market-oriented way, and reduce bamboo production costs through economies of scale." Xie Zifang said. In fact, social services with production trusteeship as the main form have been implemented in the agricultural field for many years. Especially in the field of rice, farming and harvest prevention and other links have achieved a high degree of mechanization.

Bamboo processing links, also faced with high costs, lack of innovation and other bottlenecks. Through visits and investigations, Jiang Yimin found that more than 80% of the bamboo enterprises in Nanping still focus on traditional bamboo processing, and traditional low value-added products such as bamboo products, bamboo veneer, bamboo flooring, and clear water bamboo shoots account for 90% of the share. The development of high value-added products such as bamboo physical and chemical functional materials, specific materials and bamboo biomedicine is slow.

"The development level of the national bamboo industry machinery and equipment industry is relatively low, and there are few enterprises and scientific research institutes specializing in research and development of related equipment." Jiang Yimin said that only a few companies in Nanping have built semi-automated production lines with a high automation rate, and a large number of production lines still cannot be separated from manual cooperation.

How to improve the innovation ability of bamboo industry? Yongan's strategy is to build a public service platform for bamboo industry and accurately introduce innovative resources for enterprise development. In Yongan, bamboo processing enterprises do not need to purchase expensive equipment by themselves, but only need to send the products to the shared testing laboratory of the Bamboo Industry Research Institute to complete a full set of tests: the ultraviolet aging test box only takes a few days to present the damage that takes months or even years outdoors; The programmable constant temperature and humidity test box can simulate and test the mildew and cracking of bamboo products in specific climatic environments; the simulated transportation vibration platform can simulate and test whether the bamboo furniture packaging is easily damaged under the bumpy environment during transportation... The shared testing room is one of the public services provided by Yongan Bamboo Industry Research Institute for local bamboo processing enterprises.

"We practice the principle of socialization of scientific and technological services in the bamboo industry, introduce advanced and applicable technological achievements into bamboo villages, build a public platform for normalized services for the transformation and upgrading of the bamboo industry, and at the same time establish a leading expert consultant library for the bamboo industry in China, build the country's first crowd-creation space with the theme of bamboo entrepreneurship, and fully incubate small and micro bamboo innovative enterprises." Liu Xiu, executive director of the Institute, said.

Source: Fujian Daily · New Fujian Client
Reporter: Zhang Hui
Correspondent: Huang Hai Liu Jianbo