China Life Insurance completes the "Green Finance" closed loop

(Source: China Business News)

Reprinted from: China Business News

A spring breeze brushes through the treetops of Shen Neng Environmental Protection Ecological Park (abbreviated as “Shen Neng Environmental Protection”), rustling the leaves. Standing in the café at Shenzhen Bao’an Energy Ecological Park, looking down through a large glass curtain wall, Wu Xianwei, the deputy general manager of Shen Neng Environmental Protection’s Bao’an Energy Ecological Park, points to that bottomless pit and says, “What we’re in right now isn’t a park—it’s a landfill.”

If you close your eyes, you can hardly smell any unpleasant odor. In this place that people once tried to avoid at all costs, a transformation regarding energy and the living environment has already taken place. Under the proposition of “green finance,” China Life Insurance Company Limited (abbreviated as “China Life”) is using the logic of capital to mend and reshape the link between humans and nature.

According to statistics, this super city of Shenzhen generates about 20,000 tons of municipal solid waste every day. And at the various bases it has laid out across Shenzhen, Shen Neng Environmental Protection is continuously consuming these massive wastes through the world-leading tonnage-scale grate technology.

“Just this pond can hold the amount of municipal waste generated in the whole city in one day.” Wu Xianwei says this with a different perspective on the value of municipal solid waste, because he has spent years dealing with these “urban mines.” “More than 600 kWh of electricity can be generated per ton of waste. Just for our Phase III projects alone, our daily electricity generation exceeds 3 million kWh. This isn’t just a number—it means the light of one day for 300,000 households.”

In the past, building waste treatment plants was always difficult to gain recognition from nearby residents and organizations. This is not only about ecological health and public safety, but also has a far-reaching impact on local industrial development. Shen Neng Environmental Protection’s solution is: break out of the single incineration model and build an ecological park that integrates production, offices, science education, and tourism.

To achieve this industrial-to-ecological turnaround, in addition to technical reinvention, it also requires large amounts of capital that can stay for the long haul—and plenty of patience.

This is why China Life appears. As deputy general manager of State-Owned Enterprise’s infrastructure investment business unit, and also a director of Shen Neng Environmental Protection, Xia Fan is accustomed to examining capital flows from a longer time horizon. In his view, between insurance funds and green projects, there is an innate “kinship.”

“Insurance funds are large in scale and long in duration, and their risk appetite is steady—this is the typical ‘patient capital.’” Xia Fan explains, “And green finance projects generally have long construction cycles and stable returns. These two are symbiotic.”

China Life made a strategic investment of 1.5 billion yuan into Shen Neng Environmental Protection. The money did not pursue high-impact, short-term gains. Instead, it was invested in the distant future. Xia Fan calls it a win-win of green premium and social premium. When a waste incineration plant is upgraded into an energy ecological park, the recycling of resources brings not only economic benefits, but also conveys the concept of environmental protection through science education and learning—highly consistent with China Life’s corporate values of “making oneself complete for the sake of others, and helping others reach their potential.”

Like “living water,” the funds irrigated this green ground, turning the landfill that once made people wrinkle their noses into a place citizens visit on weekends to check in. This is also a warm side of green finance: it doesn’t directly build one brick at a time, yet it supports the city’s most hidden—and most vast—metabolism system.

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