Lax supervision to blame for rising takeaway garbage

Residents at Beijing's Fengrongyuan residential community dump garbage into different bins according to the city's trash sorting policies.Zhang Wei / China Daily

The burgeoning food delivery service is a trend toward which many have mixed feelings. True, it saves busy white-collar employees the trouble of going out to eat. But to deliver the food, restaurants use extra packaging made of polypropylene, which could be recycled but is not biodegradable.

One may be tempted to blame those people ordering takeaway food and paying little attention to environmental protection. But as long as it is legal and paid for, diners are free to enjoy the delivery service.

The root cause of the increasing takeaway garbage is the lackluster supervision. According to regulations, nonbiodegradable materials can be used for producing packaging material so long as they do not contain hazardous elements and are in line with food safety standards. As for biodegradability, there is no explicit legal guidance.

Which reminds us of the regulation to ban the use of plastic bags 10 years ago. Making consumers pay for the plastic bags in supermarkets didn't stop people from using them, and very few would know that such bags can take up to 470 years to biodegrade.

Countries that have succeeded in reducing packaging waste have strict laws and supervision on the subject. So China's environmental authorities need to establish higher standards for materials used in plastic meal boxes, support the waste sorting and recycling business, and provide incentives to restaurants that use green packaging.