Plastic Bag Ban in my Beijing Hood

A week ago, China unveiled a ban on ultra-thin plastic bags, which usually break on first use and can’t be reused. Merchants can still use thicker plastic bags, but they must charge consumers for them, or face a fine of up to $1,400.

Bun maker upgrades to thicker bag.

The environmental group Greenpeace China said the action announced back in January came out of the blue, amid debate about how to cut consumption of petroleum amid rising oil prices. China consumes a trillion plastic bags a year, equivalent to chugging 37 million barrels of crude oil. The China Plastics Processing Industry Association expects the new restrictions will reduce plastic bag consumption from about 1.6 million tons a year to about 1.1 million tons

To the public, the new regulation is being plugged as an environmental action. Travel in the countryside, here and you can pass through windy villages where plastic bags float like confetti in the air, and festoon trees from top to bottom. Chinese call it “white pollution.” Plastic bags take 300 to 1,000 years to biodegrade. Not to mention the hazards they pose to animals that die from ingesting them.

So, let’s take look at how the plastic bag ban has affected my neighborhood in the past week.

The local chain supermarket now asks customers whether they would like to purchase a bag for 3 cents. The clerk at the cash register told me about half of customers ask for bags. I must admit, I have become more diligent about grabbing an extra plastic bag when I go out the door. I used to do that only when I was planning to go shopping– but the fact is the majority of my shopping is an unplanned spur-of-the moment action on the way home.

More worrisome, is what’s happening with the snack makers.

Take my local hole-in-the wall shop that sells stuffed pancake (yum!) Until last week, the shop did takeaway orders in ultra thin bags less than 0.025 millimeters, or 0.00098 inches thick. It’s now upgraded– the shop not only uses thicker bags, it’s ordered bags with the shop name on them. The shopkeeper proudly told me they were “environmentally friendly.” Looks to me like the new regulation has encouraged him to add to the garbage and pollution problem. The tiny bags are not easy to reuse.

I have yet to see a calculation comparing environmental damage– from production to disposal– for ultra thins and thicker bags, or one comparing the cost to the environment if shopkeepers simply replace ultra thins with sturdier bags. I’ve seen no data on how often thicker bags are actually recycled. In China, there is no system for recycling them. In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency reports a recycling rate of about 5 percent.

Greenpeace China activist Wang Xiaojun worries some shops are now handing out free paper bags, because they fear customers will pass them by if they have to pay for plastic. Paper bags create even more air and water pollution than plastic bags.

The most favorable outcome of the new regulation, according to Wang, is not how much plastic will be saved, but the realization among consumers that by changing their daily habits they can do something for the environment. He says five years ago the restrictions wouldn’t have made sense, because back then concern about the environment wasn’t very widespread in China.

It’s a pity, however, the government didn’t decide to go even further, and require all bags be biodegradable. There’s some interesting research going on in this area, like a project at the Missouri University of Science and Technology to use starch and fibers to produce hybrid plastics that degrade in four months. Of course, first the government would have to pin down a solution that won’t aggravate other global crises. I can just hear the outcry when corn-based plastic bags are blamed for food shortages.