China struggles to enforce ban on plastic bags

The Government has prohibited the ultra-thin bags of 0.025 mm in thickness that are ubiquitous when buying such foods as takeaway dumplings

Jane Macartney in Beijing
Strolling along a Beijing street, a young couple paused to buy a bag of fried pork dumplings. The stallholder picked up half a dozen in the filmiest of plastic bags, rolled a couple of steamed buns into another and popped the lot into yet another plastic bag.

It would be hard to tell that new nationwide limits on such packaging took effect on Sunday.

China is almost suffocating under plastic bags. Its 1.3 billion people use three billion bags every day. That’s about 1.6 million tonnes of the items each year, and the Government wants to reduce that to 1.1 million tonnes.

Increasingly aware of the rapid and widespread degradation of the environment in China’s headlong race to industrialisation and modernisation, Beijing is trying to reverse the damage.

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