1. Why Look at Two Mining Cities

Studying Gansu's waste resource recovery industry begins with a plain fact: this sector does not appear out of nowhere. There must first be "waste" before there can be "utilization."

And Gansu's largest stockpiles of waste sit in two cities built on mining—Jinchang and Baiyin. One is China's largest nickel-cobalt production base; the other is the former "Copper City," a founding ground of the Republic's non-ferrous metals industry. Decades of mining, beneficiation and smelting have left both cities with staggering volumes of industrial solid waste: tailings, smelting slag, smelting flue dust, furnace slag and iron slag, heaped along the Gobi and the banks of the Yellow River. For a long time these piles were an environmental burden; once the nickel, copper, zinc, lead, silver and even precious metals left within them were seen again, the burden began to turn into a resource.

Set apart on its own, waste resource recovery offers Gansu a clear case study: its industrial logic is not "something from nothing" but "drawing on what is at hand"—the waste comes from smelting, and the recovered metals flow back into the non-ferrous chain. This is why the Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute chose to enter through Jinchang and Baiyin to observe this industry in Gansu.

A caveat first: waste resource recovery involves a great many small and medium recycling, dismantling and regeneration firms, and most of their operating data is not public. This report covers only what public information about Jinchang and Baiyin can confirm; where firms or figures cannot be verified, it leaves a blank rather than filling it in.

2. Jinchang: Two Hundred Million Tonnes of Waste, Split into Eight Chains

The most complete sample of this industry in Gansu is in Jinchang.

Jinchang was founded on nickel. It is China's largest nickel-cobalt production base and a major refiner of platinum-group precious metals. The mining and smelting of nickel, cobalt and copper is the city's founding industry; the by-product is solid waste on an extraordinary scale. According to public reports, the city's industrial solid-waste stockpile exceeds two hundred million tonnes, spanning more than seventy types, including tailings, smelting slag, smelting flue dust, fly ash, furnace slag and iron slag. Such a "stockpile" dictates that Jinchang's recovery effort cannot stay piecemeal; it has had to be built into a system.

Jinchang's approach is to split comprehensive utilization into eight sub-chains by waste type—tailings, smelting slag, phosphogypsum, fly ash and desulphurisation gypsum, carbide slag, secondary resources, agricultural solid waste, and household and production waste. Each chain carries its own processing capacity: public reports cite roughly 1.1 million tonnes of copper-slag re-beneficiation, about 250,000 tonnes of tailings handling, around 900,000 tonnes of smelting-slag handling and about 300,000 tonnes of phosphogypsum processing. The chains are pulled along by lead firms—Jinchuan Group's copper-and-precious-metals arm among those designated as chain leaders—with more than twenty larger-scale enterprises coordinating around them.

This playbook earned a name early on. Jinchang's circular-economy practice was listed by the National Development and Reform Commission as one of China's typical regional circular-economy cases, known as the "Jinchang model," centred on resource recycling, industrial symbiosis, park-based clustering and institutional innovation. The results have been quick: according to public reports, the resource-recovery industry has grown at an average of nearly 38 percent a year over the past four years, one engine behind the city's industrial output rising from several tens of billions of yuan in 2020 to nearly two hundred billion yuan in 2024.

Read through, Jinchang's logic is plain: because the waste is abundant and concentrated, the city had no choice—and also the means—to turn recovery into an industry. Its strength is not in scavenging odds and ends, but in forming chains.

3. Baiyin: An Urban Mine Built by a Resource-Exhausted City

If Jinchang is "a thick stockpile that forced chains to form," Baiyin is the opposite situation—the stockpile is running out, and the city must rebuild through regeneration.

Baiyin was once the "Copper City," one of the important birthplaces of the Republic's non-ferrous metals industry, later designated a national resource-exhausted city. In the late stage of mining, one path for the city's transition was to turn back and "eat" the smelting slag it had piled up over decades, along with scrap metals and scrap batteries collected from society—waste rich in non-ferrous metals and valuable elements, vividly called an "urban mine."

Baiyin Huaxin Jiuhe Renewable Resources is one representative on this path. Established through investment promotion in 2021, the firm carries total investment of about 660 million yuan and a designed annual capacity to process roughly 800,000 tonnes of non-ferrous metal slag, recovering iron, zinc, silver and other valuable elements from smelting slag to produce zinc oxide, iron-silver concentrate, desulphurisation gypsum and other products; in 2023 it was named in a Ministry of Industry and Information Technology list of national industrial clusters. Another firm focused on smelting slag—Jingyuan Gaoneng, set up by a Beijing environmental-technology company—mainly regenerates electrolytic lead from non-ferrous smelting slag; public reports put its electrolytic-lead capacity at about 20,000 tonnes a year, with output value rising from about 700 million yuan in 2022 to about 2.4 billion yuan in 2024.

Baiyin's recovery map does not end there. The locality is advancing several new solid-waste projects: one firm has invested about 160 million yuan to process roughly 20,000 tonnes of metal-bearing spent catalysts a year and recover the precious metals within; another has invested about 600 million yuan to extract lithium carbonate from solid waste, with a planned capacity of about 5,500 tonnes a year. Overall, according to public reports, Baiyin has commissioned dozens of industrial resource-recovery projects with cumulative investment of about 7.5 billion yuan, and has built several national-level green factories.

Baiyin's significance is this: it has turned "transition" into a concrete business—not abstract slogans, but picking metals gram by gram out of smelting slag, spent catalysts and scrap batteries, and selling them back into the industrial system.

4. Recycled Non-Ferrous Metals and Dismantling: Two Real Links in the Chain

Following the threads of Jinchang and Baiyin outward, this industry in Gansu has two more links—real but more scattered—worth recording honestly.

One is recycled non-ferrous metals. Whether it is Jinchang's re-beneficiation of smelting slag or Baiyin's electrolytic lead and zinc oxide, the act is the same: extracting non-ferrous metals a second time from waste and returning them to the copper, lead and zinc supply chains. This link meshes naturally with Gansu's primary non-ferrous industry; recycled metal need not travel far but can feed local smelting and processing nearby—the solid ground on which Gansu's recycled non-ferrous metals stand.

The other is the dismantling and recycling of end-of-life vehicles and scrap appliances. This link sits closer to the consumer end, scattered around cities centred on Lanzhou. Under current rules, dismantling end-of-life vehicles requires the corresponding qualification issued by commerce authorities, and the trade has a clear entry threshold. But the firms here are mostly small and medium, and data on any single firm's processing volume or revenue is extremely limited in public; this report draws no conclusions on specific scale, confirming only that this downstream recycling link genuinely exists.

For the equipment and materials sales teams supplying these recycled-metal firms, solid-waste utilization plants and dismantling-and-recycling enterprises, Tianxia Gongchang lets you filter Gansu's waste-resource-recovery factory directory and decision-maker contacts along the two dimensions of region and industry, turning upstream customer development from canvassing firm by firm on instinct into something traceable by map and by sector.

5. The Institute's Assessment: Counting the Burden as an Asset Is a Problem Not Yet Solved

Drawing the two threads of Jinchang and Baiyin together, Gansu's waste resource recovery industry shows a distinct "mining-city base": its raw material is not freshly mined but the solid waste and urban scrap left by decades of non-ferrous metal industry; its way forward is to move what was once an environmental burden back onto the asset side of the balance sheet.

The strengths and limits of this path are equally clear. The strength lies in the fact that Jinchang's two hundred million tonnes of stockpiled waste and Baiyin's decades of smelting legacy are themselves a "mine" no other place possesses, while recycled metal can flow back into the local non-ferrous industry nearby, closing the loop. The limit is that solid-waste utilization is a business highly sensitive to process, energy cost and price—when metal prices swing, the margin on regeneration narrows with them, and many projects must still rely on scale and technology to keep grinding costs down.

The Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute's view is that the hardest part of this industry in Gansu is not "whether there is waste" but "whether waste can be turned into money, steadily." Jinchang has proved that "forming chains" can make an industry out of scattered solid waste, and Baiyin has proved that a resource-exhausted city can stand again through regeneration; but truly "wringing dry" two hundred million tonnes of stockpiled waste rests not on one or two star projects, but on whether the whole chain still pencils out after generations of process iteration and cycle after cycle of price troughs. Turning the burden into an asset—the opening is written; the ending will take many years yet to deliver.

Data Sources

  • Tianxia Gongchang (Gansu waste resource recovery industry and related upstream factory directory and industry data)
  • China News Service: Gansu Jinchang "wringing dry" industrial solid waste, building a "zero-waste city" (solid-waste stockpile, 70-plus waste types, eight industrial chains, processing capacities by link, output figures)
  • China Nonferrous Metals News (cnmn): Jinchang circular economy and the "Jinchang model" (NDRC regional circular-economy typical case)
  • Economic Daily, Xinhua: Jinchang circular economy and industrial output (nickel-cobalt base status, resource-recovery industry growth)
  • Baiyin Municipal Government website: Baiyin "urban mine" solid-waste projects (Huaxin Jiuhe investment and processing scale, Hongxin Guiyuan spent-catalyst project, Weidali lithium-carbonate project)
  • The Paper (Pengpai): Baiyin building a distinctive waste-and-by-product recovery industrial cluster (project count and cumulative investment, green factories, Huaxin Jiuhe recovered elements)
  • Bjx and related public reports: Baiyin recycled non-ferrous metals and electrolytic-lead capacity and output changes
  • 12371.cn (Communist Party member network): Gansu Baiyin resource-exhausted-city transition (Copper City history and transition context)
  • Chinese commerce-authority public materials: qualification requirements for end-of-life vehicle dismantling and recycling