Electroplating is a typical industry of high energy consumption and high pollution. Some chemical, dyeing and printing, electroplating and other highly polluting projects will be eliminated by the end of 2019 according to our deployment in the Requirements for Implementing “263� Special Operations; under such context, some electroplating enterprises actively conduct transformations to seek a way out. The IMOC Electronic in Wujin National High-tech Park becomes one of a few electroplating enterprises obtaining qualification of non-relocation. In today’s Ecological Battle of “263�, let’s visitsuch German enterprise and explore its secret of “Zero Discharge�.

Entering the electroplating workshop of IMOC Electronic, the reporter saw only dozens of workers working in five production lines of busy operation. These full-automatic devices mainly undertake the processes of gold plating, tin plating and nickel plating. Traditional electroplating needs a large amount of water for rinsing, in contrast, acidic wastewater and cyanide-containing waste water discharged from the IMOC production lines will be collected separately for ion exchange treatment, after that, the water can be recycled for more than 50 times and reuse rate can reach 98%.

[Actual recording] LIU Yuntao, EHA Manager of IMOC Electronic Components (Changzhou) Co., Ltd.: we have a full-automatic computer-control treatment system for collected water, by which the water will be discharged after all heavy metals are removed. This is our water recycling device; after filtering and ion exchange, the water can be back to production and used for rinsing products; 150 tons of production water can be recycled for 50 times, but our final wastewater is about 3 tons each day. Such water only contains little salt, very clear, and heavy metals contained therein after exchanged can be hardly tested.

Although this wastewater treatment workshop has various chemical reactors, the reporter smelled no pungent odor; concentration of nickel determined in the finallydischarged wastewater was 0.01-0.04mg per liter, and that of copper 0.05mg per liter, which are negligible. Since settled in Wujin National High-tech Park in 2006, IMOC has always held on the philosophy of clean production, and taken Euro 1,700,000 from the total investment of Euro 7,000,000 for environment protection, including importing full-automatic electroplating production line from Germany, adopting less toxic and harmful pure tin electroplating instead of toxic and harmful lead-tin alloy electroplating in terms of front-end control, using compressed air to blow back plating solution for noise reduction in terms of process control and apply multistage countercurrent rinsing process to significantly reduce consumption of raw materials and generation of wastewater.

[Actual recording] Mr. Egervari, CEO of IMOC Electronic Components (Changzhou) Co., Ltd.: we also entrust qualified contractors to dispose sludge, filter elements and resins, of which, sludge, resin, etc. can be used by their contractors for metal refining and recycling. Water recycling treatment consumes much electric power.As water rate is relatively lower than electric rate, other enterprises prefer to discharge the water directly without any treatment to save much cost. Each process from design of production line, all raw materials used for manufacturing to some chemical raw materials, is closely interrelated to environment protection. Our production line is always in the optimum condition of treatment, and theoretically, the tail water can reach drinkable standard.

With only 80 employees, such enterprisereach profitability in 2016, and inputs 15-20% of that in environment protection each year. However, it never reduces, but increases such input year by year.

[Actual recording] Mr. Egervari, CEO of IMOC Electronic Components (Changzhou) Co., Ltd.: actually, Germany and China have the same philosophy in environmental improvement. But in Germany, environmental awareness has been instilled into everyone from kindergarten. Everyone and every enterprise will do it by themselves; they will not think of it as a responsibility and obligation of government departments but think it is what we all shall do.