About China Plastics

China Plastics

China Plastics, known in Chinese as Zhongguo Suliao (中国塑料), is a Chinese-language journal for the plastics industry and plastics research community, published in Beijing. Founded in 1987, it carries the International Standard Serial Number ISSN 1001-9278, an identifier embedded in the DOIs of its articles in the form 10.19491/j.issn.1001-9278. The journal is sponsored by the China Plastics Processing Industry Association together with the Beijing Research Institute of Chemical Industry, a pairing of the national industry association with a major chemical research institute. It covers plastic materials, processing technology, recycling and industry developments, and it is recognised as a Chinese core journal for the plastics sector. Its volume numbering tells its story at a glance: volume 28 appeared in 2014 and volume 38 in 2024, exactly the sequence expected of an annual-volume journal founded in 1987 and published continuously since. This profile records the verified facts about the journal, its sponsors and its place in China's plastics world.

Founding in 1987 and publication record

China Plastics was founded in 1987, during the decade in which China's plastics industry expanded at exceptional speed following the reform and opening period. Industry accounts of the sector note that after 1979 China's plastic products output grew at rates above ten per cent a year, creating a large new constituency of manufacturers, machinery makers, resin producers and researchers who needed a national journal of their own. China Plastics was created for that constituency, two years before its sponsoring association itself was formally founded in 1989. The journal's publication record can be checked independently of any publisher's claim through its own archive: its English-language web presence lists, for example, volume 28, issue 4, published on 15 April 2014, with articles on the state of the China plastics industry and on progress in modifying nanoparticles by atom transfer radical polymerisation. A decade later the journal was at volume 38, issue 9, in 2024, publishing work such as a study of a new phosphorus-nitrogen composite flame retardant applied in thermoplastic polyurethane. Monthly issue numbering within annual volumes, running unbroken from 1987 to the present, makes the journal one of the longest continuously published specialist titles of China's plastics sector.

The China Plastics Processing Industry Association

The journal's senior sponsor, the China Plastics Processing Industry Association (CPPIA), was founded in 1989. The association describes itself as an industrial organisation in the field of China's plastics processing industry: a nationwide, non-profit social organisation with legal-person status, voluntarily composed of enterprises, institutions, social groups, scientific research institutes, universities and colleges, and individuals engaged in the plastics processing industry and related industries. Its offices are in the Chaoyang District of Beijing. Among its stated activities, the association lists its periodicals — CPPIA Communication Monthly, China Plastics and World Plastics — and notes that it edits and publishes the China Plastics Industry Annual and various seminar paper collections. China Plastics is therefore not a stand-alone commercial title but the research journal within the association's own publishing portfolio, the place where the industry body presents peer-reviewed technical work alongside its news communication and its annual industry record. The association's wider role gives the journal context: CPPIA represents China's plastics processors internationally, joined the industry's Global Declaration for Solutions on Marine Litter, became a partner in the Operation Clean Sweep programme for preventing resin loss to the environment, and hosts the biennial China International Plastics Exhibition, first held in 2014.

The Beijing Research Institute of Chemical Industry

The journal's second sponsor, the Beijing Research Institute of Chemical Industry, supplies the research side of the partnership. Where the association brings the industry — its member enterprises, its statistics, its exhibitions and its policy work — a chemical industry research institute brings laboratories: polymer synthesis and modification, materials testing and processing research of the kind that fills the journal's pages. This dual sponsorship, association plus institute, is a deliberate and common design for Chinese sector journals, and it explains the journal's distinctive mixture of contents. Papers in China Plastics can move between laboratory research on resins, additives and composites, engineering studies of processing equipment and methods, and analyses of the industry itself, because both halves of its readership are represented in its ownership. The Beijing base of both sponsors also fixes the journal's geography: it is a capital-city, national title, edited in the city where the association, the institute and much of China's petrochemical research establishment are located, and distributed from there to a readership spread across the country's manufacturing regions.

Scope: materials, processing, recycling and the industry

The journal's stated scope covers plastic materials, processing technology, recycling and industry developments. Plastic materials research includes the synthesis and modification of resins, the development of additives such as flame retardants, and the study of blends, composites and nanocomposites — the 2014 article on nanoparticle modification by atom transfer radical polymerisation and the 2024 article on a phosphorus-nitrogen flame retardant for thermoplastic polyurethane are representative examples from its archive. Processing technology covers the operations by which plastics are shaped and finished: extrusion, moulding and the other conversion processes of the industry the sponsoring association represents, together with the machinery and process science behind them. Recycling has grown from a minor theme to a central one as China's plastics system has confronted its waste problem. Industry analyses record that China consumed around 981 million tonnes of five commodity plastics — polyethylene, polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride, polystyrene and ABS — between 2000 and 2019, generating some 590 million tonnes of plastic waste, of which only about 27 per cent was recycled; research on recovery, regeneration and high-value use of waste plastics is therefore core business for this journal's community. Industry developments complete the scope: the journal regularly carries assessments of the state of China's plastics industry, including the annual review "China Plastics Industry" authored from the association's data, which is cited in international scholarship on China's plastics system.

A core journal for the plastics sector

China Plastics is recognised in China as a Chinese core journal for the plastics sector. Core-journal status, awarded through China's national core-journal selection process, identifies the titles that anchor a field's literature: the journals libraries prioritise, researchers cite and authors target. For a sector journal, that standing certifies that its peer review and editorial standards meet the national benchmark, distinguishing it from the large number of trade magazines and newsletters that also serve the plastics business. The journal's contents reflect the dual character that core status rewards — academically reviewed research on materials and processing, combined with authoritative industry reporting that trade publications cannot supply, because the association's own industry statistics and annual reviews appear under the same cover. When international researchers write about China's plastics economy, the journal is among the Chinese sources they cite: a study of plastic packaging waste management in China, for instance, cites the journal's annual industry review for 2020, published in China Plastics volume 35 in 2021, as its source for industry conditions. A journal cited abroad for facts about its own industry is performing exactly the function its sponsors founded it to perform.

Bibliographic identity and identifiers

The journal's bibliographic identity is stable and easily verified. Title: China Plastics, in Chinese Zhongguo Suliao. ISSN: 1001-9278. Place: Beijing. Sponsors: the China Plastics Processing Industry Association and the Beijing Research Institute of Chemical Industry. Its articles carry DOIs under the prefix 10.19491 with the journal's ISSN embedded — a 2024 article, for example, is registered as DOI 10.19491/j.issn.1001-9278.2024.09.015, encoding journal, year, issue and article in a single string. The journal maintains an English-language web presence presenting its issues and articles to international readers, through which its archive can be browsed volume by volume. In databases of Chinese academic journals it is catalogued under its ISSN and Chinese title, and its citation abbreviation, China Plast., follows the standard pattern. Directory users should distinguish it from two neighbours: China Plastics Industry, the association's annual record, and the association's news communication — both listed by CPPIA among its own publications alongside the journal — and from similarly named English-language plastics trade titles published outside China, which are unrelated.

Readership: an industry that reads its research

The readership of China Plastics is the Chinese plastics community in its full breadth: researchers in universities and institutes working on polymers and materials; engineers and managers in the tens of thousands of enterprises that make up China's plastics processing sector; resin and additive producers; machinery manufacturers; and the officials and association staff who track the industry's development. Association figures presented in the mid-2000s already counted more than 60,000 plastics processors in China, with dozens of companies above one billion yuan in annual sales, and the sector has grown since. A monthly journal carrying both research and industry analysis serves that readership as a common reference point: the laboratory scientist and the factory engineer read the same title. The journal's annual industry review functions as a shared statement of where the sector stands — production, consumption, trade and technology — while its research papers show where the sector's materials and processes are going, from nanocomposites and functional additives to recycling and waste utilisation. Few Chinese sector journals combine both functions under association sponsorship as directly as this one.

The journal amid China's plastics debates

No publication about plastics in China can be separated from the environmental questions that now surround the material, and China Plastics sits at the centre of its industry's response. The association that sponsors it has signed the global industry declaration on marine litter, joined Operation Clean Sweep, established working groups on waste plastics recycling and high-value utilisation and on marine plastic waste prevention, and promoted "easy to recycle, easy to regenerate" packaging standards. The research side of the same agenda — recycling technologies, degradable plastics, waste utilisation strategies, carbon reduction across the production chain — is the material of the journal's articles on recycling and materials. Read over time, the journal therefore documents a sector in transition: founded in 1987 to serve a rapidly growing processing industry, it now also serves that industry's effort to make its products recoverable and its processes lower-carbon. For a media directory, that makes China Plastics more than a technical periodical; it is a primary source for how China's plastics industry understands and presents itself, in its own language, across nearly four decades.

Summary

In summary: China Plastics (Zhongguo Suliao) is a Beijing-based, Chinese-language journal founded in 1987 and published under ISSN 1001-9278. It is sponsored by the China Plastics Processing Industry Association — founded in 1989, the nationwide non-profit industry body for plastics processing, which lists China Plastics among its own periodicals — together with the Beijing Research Institute of Chemical Industry. It publishes research and reporting on plastic materials, processing technology, recycling and industry developments, is recognised as a Chinese core journal for the plastics sector, issues monthly numbers within annual volumes that had reached volume 38 by 2024, and registers its articles with DOIs under the prefix 10.19491. For readers tracing China's plastics industry — its materials science, its manufacturing technology and its turn toward recycling — China Plastics is one of the sector's established, continuously published sources of record.