China’s food delivery boom may undercut plans to reduce plastic bags

Name: China’s sweeping plan to ban single-use plastics
Uploaded: 2020-07-27T06:42:20.000Z
Duration: 1 min 42 s
Description: China’s sweeping plan to ban single-use plastics

Environmental activists fear restrictions to be introduced next year will lead to little change in consumer habits

Changing lifestyles have increased reliance on plastics, which can take 200 years to break down in the environment

Reading Time:3 minutes

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Previous efforts to discourage Chinese consumers from using plastic bags have been unsuccessful. Photo: Shutterstock

Mandy Zuo

Published: 2:42pm, 27 Jul 2020Updated: 11:38pm, 27 Jul 2020

Every day, about 10 plastic bags come into Li Xin’s home in Beijing, filled with food and other daily necessities bought from local stores or online. The 40-year-old housewife throws away the thin and flimsy ones and reuses the rest as rubbish bags.

Li seldom takes a reusable bag when shopping, finding it “troublesome” and said she was “already supporting environmental protection by reusing them to carry waste.”

China – one of the world’s biggest users of plastics – will ban non-degradable plastic bags in supermarkets, shopping centres and flourishing food delivery services in its major cities from next year. At the same time, non-degradable, single-use plastic straws, plastic cotton buds, and foam plastic disposable dinnerware will no longer be allowed nationwide, according to a plan issued earlier this year.

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China’s sweeping plan to ban single-use plastics

But environmental activists fear the ban may lead to little change, failing just as Beijing’s first action against plastic pollution did 12 years ago. One reason may be the continuing difficulty in changing public attitudes.

China first attempted to encourage consumers to use less plastic in 2008, introducing a charge for plastic bags in supermarkets, shopping centres and food markets. But for Li, the cost – at 0.2 yuan (less than one US cent per bag) – is negligible.

“I can’t tell which plastic bag is degradable and which is not. I guess I’ll need pay 0.2 yuan more to buy degradable bags with this new order?” she said.

China generated more than 211 million tonnes of municipal solid waste in 2018, of which around 12 per cent was plastic, according to the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development.