As most of the west continues to work on controlling The Bic C, China has moved past that turmoil and onto implementing local and national preventative measures to ensure that heathy living and normalcy continues for Chinese residents. One of them being The Big P; plastic.
Where one practices sanitation in the workplace and home, plastic is doomed to follow. The demand for disposable masks, gloves, hand sanitizer bottles, testing kits and other plastic made tools to aid hygienic practices in pre-COVID times has driven a new wave of plastic waste into our landfills and oceans.
The Big C loves The Big P, and the pull towards single-use plastic for hygiene has inevitably caused a halt to plastic bans where they were once in place.
According to a story published in the LA Times, governments in California, Thailand, Bangladesh and Singapore, to name a few, lifted bans or halted plans for combating the plastic waste epidemic in their regions and instead increased their plastic waste in response to The Big C.
One example is Thailand, where a game plan to ban plastic shopping bags earlier this year and overall slash their plastic waste by 2020 is instead now expected to increase overall waste by 30 percent, an inevitable conundrum plaguing governments’ eco-friendly initiatives during our current climate crisis.
We are in a time of new normalcy where daily habits and consumer mindsets have shifted to a place of heightened awareness of ourselves and our surroundings. One of the more obvious results of that is new added baggage. When stepping out your door to brace the day ahead, you can expect to be carrying a few key items in your daily travel bag that didn’t come to mind pre-Covid-19.
“I use the mask and hand sanitizer everyday now.” states Jessica Jiang, a Chinese resident and teacher in Nanjing. Including just a few of the disposable plastic essentials filling up our trash bins during this new wave, Jiang offers a small glimpse of what hundreds of millions of people around the world are doing on a daily basis. Although there are reusable alternatives to some of these, such as masks and wipes, if those aren’t as readily available or affordable, individuals have no other option to practice safe hygiene without participating in disposable plastic use.
Some new adoptions like sanitation practices that are tied to plastic packaging can be brushed off as mandatory and unfortunate to the current climate crisis brought on by the pandemic. However, others may not be perceived as such.
Alas, The Big P doesn’t end there. Plastic packaging is another big industry contributing to the plastic wave brought by the Big C. And as locals slowly return to normalcy in daily life, restaurants were also able to get back on the market, migrating to online delivery services. However, now with stricter restrictions in cooking, preparing and delivering their meals in order to meet the seismic shift in consumer mindsets. But there’s a catch, more plastic.
During an 8-week lockdown that eased June 1, Singapore’s 5.7 million residents generated an additional 1,470 tons of plastic waste from takeout packaging and food delivery alone.
Singapore and the aforementioned countries aren’t alone in the food packaging game.
Respectively, China’s Meituan Dianping’s food delivery business saw a 13.2 percent increase in total revenue growth in their second quarter this year and a staggering 65.7 percent operating profit increase. As the demand to shift to online e-commerce, plastic packaging is expected to rise despite the current climate crisis alert.
During their second quarter, Meituan Dianping’s fulfilled average daily food delivery transactions of ¥24.5 million; an increase of 6.9 percent from last year. Demonstrating a booming industry that initially benefited from the lockdown as a result of the pandemic, the intensity of online shopping and delivery industry isn’t showing signs of slowing down, meaning more single-use plastic being moved around the country, evidently landing in overflowing landfills and oceans.
As Asia’s fast-growing economies can expect a larger scale of waste than they have ever seen in a matter of a few months, there is an urgency for the waste collection and recycling systems to work harder on implementing and enforcing methods that support the efficiency of recycling and disposing of waste in ways that are not detrimental to the environment.
TUS-EST is one Chinese company showing solutionary efforts to China’s Big P crisis. As a technology enterprise for comprehensive environmental management, TusEnvironment is dedicating its mission to utilise all sources of waste through zero-carbon and waste-free builders into sustainable alternatives such as energy, used as electricity. Highlighting just one of its many programs in eradicating the cradle to grave cycles of disposable waste warming our planet, we can hope for smarter, sustainable and nourishing recycling systems in China’s future.
