From transforming an abandoned mine into a public park, to giving a disused factory a new lease of life as a cultural center, Binhai New Area is building an environmentally friendly place for its residents to live.

The area’s story can be best demonstrated by the dramatic evolution of the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city, a key bilateral green development project established 10 years ago.

The area where the Eco-city is located used to be polluted salt pans but over the years has been turned into an environment of green trees, clear water, flowers, eco-friendly buildings and low-density population.

Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city has created the first set of standards for an ecological city in the world — with all buildings complying to green standards in design, construction and life cycle, 90 percent of all traffic being environmentally friendly and a 20 percent usage rate of renewable energy.

One of the achievements of the Eco-city is the construction of an innovative water circulation system which uses recycled water, collected rainwater and desalinated seawater, Yang Baojun, president of China Academy of Urban Planning and Design, told Guangming Daily.

The collected rainwater is used to irrigate the local landscape and sets a good example for northern cities where water is in short supply, Yang said.

Binhai New Area announced its goal of building a prosperous livable intelligent city in late 2017. It said more efforts will be made to improve the environment, social welfare and industry upgrading.

“In the past, people only cared about the speed of GDP growth. Now, the quality of the economic growth has become more important,” Yang Yongmao, deputy chief of the statistics bureau of the new area, told People’s Daily.

The area is also introducing new technologies in manufacturing, retail, port management and finance, on the way to constructing an intelligent city.

Some of the technologies in use include Wi-Fi services at bus stations, unmanned supermarkets and automated production lines.

Tianjin Port, a major hub for cross-border trade, has also adopted an intelligent system based on cloud data and computing, to improve its efficiency.

The scale of major industries involved in intelligent manufacturing in the area will reach 50 billion yuan ($7.2 billion) by 2020, to bring about an output value up to 200 billion yuan, statistics from the government show.

“Binhai New Area is not only an industrial city, but also a green, livable and convenient place,” Zhang Fanqi, who has lived in the area for about 10 years, told Guangming Daily. “It’s really relaxing when reading the book while feeling the sea breeze.”