China Takes Another Green Baby Step Forward

你好 (ni hao) from Beijing, home to the eponymous duck dish, a treasure trove of cultural sites and relics, and a blanket of smog that would put Los Angeles to shame! Week two of my stay in the “Middle Kingdom” has almost passed, and already I have been surprised by: 1) how many people can physically squeeze themselves into a subway car, 2) how quickly prices have risen since my last visit two years ago, and 3) how steadily the Chinese people are going green.

As proved by Americans’ sluggish response to voluntary bans on plastic bags in cities such as L.A., people generally won’t do something they consider inconvenient unless they absolutely have to. As of June 1, a nationwide ban on thin plastic bags took effect in China. The ban primarily targets the ubiquitous, 0.025 mm-thick plastic bags, which are commonly referred to as “white pollution”—白色污染. The use of sturdier plastic bags carries a fine. Because the Chinese tend to buy groceries or cooked goods almost daily—the produce is fresh and street vendors are as common as Starbucks cafés in the States—a few of these flimsy bags a day for each person can culminate into an environmental disaster. According to multiple resources, China’s 1.3 billion people currently use at least 3 million of them a day, or, a wasteful 1.6 tons each year. The country’s largest manufacturer of these thin bags, Huaqiang, has already closed down, and with the official ban on thin-plastic-bag production and distribution, China hopes to save the 37 million barrels of oil it currently uses to manufacture these bags.

When I was in Shanghai last week, my grandfather carried a collapsible metal cart with him every time he went to buy groceries. When we went to Wal-Mart (where, by the way, you can buy live toads and turtles for your soup, and see an in-house butcher cleave hunks of meat for you), the only plastic bags we used were to wrap meat, seafood and some fruits and vegetables. Granted, they were plastic bags, and, from the feel of them, they were the banned bags. However, unless Chinese plastic manufacturers come up with a cheap, biodegradable version, shoppers have no option but to continue keeping their beef, catfish or clams in plastic bags. There’s progress, though, at least in the big cities like Beijing or Shanghai. At the Shanghai Wal-Mart we visited, not a single customer left the store with his purchases in a plastic bag. In Beijing, my host family proudly uses a blue Carrefour tote for their grocery shopping.

While the response to the ban has been mixed—many small vendors fear that they will lose business if they charge customers for a plastic bag, when the cost of the goods they’re selling barely exceed the government-decreed fine—environmental awareness in China has risen over the years. My grandfather and my host family support the plastic bag ban, and the latter uses environmentally-friendly detergents made from organic products, in addition to a solar thermal system. From the protests against a proposed chemical plant in Xiamen last year to the prevalence of residential solar thermal systems and green advertising, businesses are learning that there’s money to be made in going green in China (or, money not to be lost), although China still has a long way to go before it loses its position as the world’s top energy-guzzler.

Whether we can attribute this increased desire for greenness to an administrative desire to show off for the Olympics, to a dawning realization of the profitability of going green or to a Chinese understanding of how much damage the environment has sustained, the fact that many Chinese have been making lifestyle choices less wasteful and less energy-inefficient than they used to be certainly gives cause for hope.