The 20th China Patent Award was recently released in Beijing. After winning the 19th China Excellent Patent Award in 2017 for “a regeneration method of iron catalyst,” Nantong Xingchen won the China Excellent Patent Award again this year for its patent for the invention “a process for recovering epoxy chloropropane from wastewater.”

The annual China Patent Award, co-sponsored by China’s State Intellectual Property Office and the World Intellectual Property Organization, aims to encourage and commend patentees and inventors who have made outstanding contributions to technological innovation and economic and social development. The award selection includes merit-based recommendation, preliminary acceptance, professional review, review by the review committee, soliciting public opinions, and final approval, representing the highest level of patent evaluation in China.

In recent years, with the rapid development of the national economy, the epoxy resin industry has also made great progress. In this context, China has become the world’s largest epoxy producer and user. However, wastewater treatment in epoxy resin production has always been a difficult problem for the development of the whole industry. On the one hand, epoxy wastewater has high COD content, complex composition, poor biodegradability, and great treatment difficulty. Also, with the continuous improvement of domestic environmental protection standards and the increasing pressure of emission reduction, conventional wastewater treatment methods can no longer meet the requirements in terms of policy and economy.

“A process for recovering epoxy chloropropane from wastewater,” Nantong Xingchen’s invention patent, purifies and recovers epoxy chloropropane from epoxy wastewater and applies it in epoxy resin production, solving three major technical problems of difficult epoxy wastewater treatment, poor recovery effect, and serious resource waste. The purity of the recovered epoxy chloropropane reaches 95%-98%. Epoxy chloropropane can be directly used in epoxy resin production, achieving recycling and remarkable economic benefits. The patented invention greatly reduces the technical difficulty and treatment cost of wastewater treatment and has good environmental and social benefits. Since the invention was adopted, Nantong Xingchen and Wuxi Resin Factory recovered 19,000 tons of epoxy chloropropane from 2006 to 2017, with direct economic benefits reaching RMB 160 million.

The invention not only brings positive assistance to Nantong Xingchen but also eliminates the technical bottleneck of the epoxy resin industry. It has driven the sustainable development of the whole industry, playing an important supporting role in the development of domestic epoxy resin industry. Under the guidance of the idea of the invention, the recycling of other substances from wastewater of the epoxy resin industry has also achieved satisfactory results. Currently, mainstream installations in domestic epoxy resin enterprises all adopt the technology of recovering chloropropane for production.

Nantong Xingchen has always attached much importance to technological innovation and patent protection. Exploitation of internal key technologies, accumulation of intellectual property, and patent application are gradually becoming important sources of technological innovation for the company. In the epoxy field alone, 11 patents have been applied successively, seven of which have been authorized by the State Intellectual Property Office. In December 2018, the company’s application of “a method for treating process wastewater for preparing 2,6-dimethyl phenol” won ChemChina’s annual excellent patent award and was shortlisted for the award for six consecutive years. A number of invention patents have won national and ChemChina’s patent awards in a row. The awards have demonstrated Nantong Xingchen's positive attitude of attaching importance to technological innovation and comprehensive technological advantages in related fields, further stimulated the innovation enthusiasm of scientific researchers, and boosted the company’s core competitiveness.