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China needs more efforts to fully ban free plastic bags

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2008-07-02 16:44

"Sorry, we do not have any large hand-torn plastic bags now," said a sale promotion staff at the rice and flour counter. "You may put the rice in two smaller bags," the sales girl suggested to Hu, who planned to buy some unpacked rice.

Similar stories took place at the Letian-mart supermarket, also at Chongwenmen. "In the past, consumers would first put seafood and meat in hand-torn plastic bags and put them into free plastic shopping bags at the cashiers. Now that the plastic shopping bag ban is being carried out, most people will not use charged plastic bags," said a staff surnamed Li from the supermarket.

"The charged plastic bags are less in demand, but hand-torn bags are used at least 30 percent more than last month," said Li.

Are they really environment-friendly?

With regard to charged-for plastic bags in supermarkets, people are wondering if they are really environment-friendly.

On June 7, Yu Yurong bought about 30 U.S. dollars worth goods at the Huayuan outlet of Beijing Hualian Supermarket Group, the largest supermarket in northwest China's Xining City. She had to buy two large plastic bags at the cashier to load the goods, at 0.3 yuan for each plastic bag.

"It is all right to buy the plastic bags. But I am wondering if the bags are really environment friendly," said Yu.

Trade insiders say that plastic bags available on the markets are largely separated into the three types of common plastic bags, degradable plastic bags and starch-based plastic bags. Standardized plastic bags sold in supermarkets after the June 1 ban illustrate what types the bags are at bag corners.

The bags Yu bought were labeled as "shopping plastic bag", apparently the common type. Trade insiders said that since the "free shopping plastic bag ban" does not compel businesses to use degradable ones, most supermarkets choose common plastic bags to save costs.

"Common plastic bags are hard to degrade. They need more than 200 years to perish naturally when buried deep," said Zhou Ming, manager of Xining Garbage Processing Company.

In comparison, degradable plastic bags and starch-based plastic bags would wither away much faster and become more environment-friendly.

However, the latter two have their own defects. Degradable plastic bags would only split and pulverize plastics earlier than the common type. Degraded plastic molecules would integrate with soil as well, reducing farming outputs. Starch-based plastic bags could make only a "semi-degradation", a hidden source of white pollution, said Zhou Ming.

"Money will not buy environment protection. Plastic bags meeting with the 'free plastic bag ban' are not necessarily equal to environment-friendly bags. To truly protect the environment, we'd better pick up cloth bags and bamboo baskets," said Zhou Ming.

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