In people's daily lives, plastic waste such as beverage plastic cups, plastic straws, straw packaging bags, plastic trays, and cup-sealed direct drinking lids are everywhere

At present, the global consumption of plastic straws is astonishing. In the United States, nearly 500 million plastic straws are discarded every day, and the total length of them connected can circle the earth two and a half times

Relevant departments, industry associations, etc. should increase publicity on the "plastic ban" and guide enterprises and consumers to reduce the production and consumption of disposable plastic products

Reporter Zhao Li

Intern Li Jiangyu

Difficult to degrade plastic waste has become a recognized governance problem in the world.

China's "plastic ban" has been in place for 11 years, and the ban on the import of "foreign garbage" including various solid wastes such as waste plastics has been implemented for more than a year. Nowadays, more and more people carry environmentally friendly bags with them, and fewer and fewer goods are over-packaged. However, has white garbage really gone away from people?

A reporter from the Legal Daily recently found that in people's daily lives, plastic waste such as beverage plastic cups, plastic straws, straw packaging bags, beverage plastic trays, and cup-mouth sealed direct drinking lids are still everywhere.

Cold drinks are popular

Giving rise to a large amount of garbage

At the end of May, the temperature in Beijing approached 35 degrees. The heat makes people crave something cooler - cold drinks. Summer is the peak sales season for beverage shops. Salesmen in shopping malls enthusiastically promote tastings, and shouts of "buy one cup get one free" and "half price for the second cup" are heard on both sides of the street.

When it comes to plastic waste, most people think of plastic bags, packaging bags and express parcels, and few people associate milk tea with white pollution. But the reporter's investigation found that beverage shops generate a huge amount of plastic waste every day.

On April 22, coffee chain giant Starbucks announced that it would stop supplying plastic straws to stores in China within this year, and has begun piloting more than 1,000 stores in Shanghai, Shenzhen and other places.

But on May 23, reporters visited two Starbucks stores in Chaoyang Joy City and one in Wanda Plaza in Tongzhou District and found that plastic straws were still placed in front of the counter for customers to pick up if they needed them.

Although Starbucks also provides direct drinking lids, most customers still use straws, and the clerks will also pack the straws together when packing.

Milk tea is dependent on straws. Some milk tea categories add pearls, fruit pulp, and nuts. In order to match different types of milk tea, some stores even prepare a variety of straws. The reporter visited and found that in 20 beverage stores in Chaoyang Joy City and 20 beverage stores in Wanda Plaza Beijing Tongzhou Store, all provide plastic straws, and there is no limit on how many customers can take. The packaging bags for straws are mostly plastic packaging, and only a few chain beverage stores use paper packaging.

For some beverage stores with large production volumes, in addition to dine-in, there are also a large number of take-out orders, which are prone to spillage. Among the above-mentioned merchants, most use fixed trays with sealing tape. Although except for one beverage store that uses plastic trays, the rest of the merchants that provide trays choose paper trays, but the amount of plastic tape consumed for sealing is still considerable.

A beverage store waiter told reporters: "The tape in the store is only used to seal the cup mouth, but some purchasing agents are not confident in the store's sealing. These people sometimes borrow tape from us to wrap the milk tea tightly."

The waiter pointed to the long queue for buying milk tea to the reporter, "Takeout only takes orders close to the distance, and many customers who are far away will find purchasing agents." The reporter noticed that this beverage shop only uses cup lids to seal. Due to the long distance, in order to prevent spillage, the beverage purchasing agent will use tape to fix the cup lid as much as possible and block any possible gaps, and the merchant acquiesces to this behavior.

"A roll of tape will be used up quickly." said the waiter.

Plastic packaging

Discarded after drinking

The most consumed plastic product in beverage shops is the beverage cup for milk tea.

With the arrival of summer, the sales of cold drinks have risen sharply. Some merchants use the transparent characteristics of plastic cups to make gradient milk tea, dirty tea like oil paintings, and colorful fruit tea. At the Chaoyang Joy City store of the Internet celebrity milk tea Heytea, nearly 50 cups of milk tea were produced in the 15 minutes observed by the reporter, all using plastic cups.

Most of the other stores are like this. Although most stores also prepare paper cups, they are only used when making hot drinks. But now, there are few customers buying hot drinks. A popular online beverage shop, famous for its dirty tea, simply abandoned paper cups, and all drinks in the store were packaged in plastic cups. Among the 40 beverage shops visited by the reporter, only one beverage shop that created a sense of quality used paper cups.

At the same time, there are also problems with the direct drinking lids sealed at the mouth of the cup. Due to the exquisite design and the need to have a sealing function, all the direct drinking lids observed by the reporter are plastic products.

The reporter found that the plastic cups and cup lids used by most beverage shops are clearly marked as food-grade PP5 plastic, but there are still a few shops that use plastic cups and plastic covers that are soft and thin, without any logos.

Some businesses use hot film sealing machines to package drinks, but the plastic film used for sealing is only printed with the brand name of the store, and the reporter did not observe any relevant quality grade logos. Approaching the edge of the plastic cup that has been sealed with a hot film, you can smell the special smell of heated plastic products.

On some e-commerce platforms, the reporter found that plastic cups made of PP5 material have become mainstream products. This type of product uses injection molding technology. The wholesale price of a 500ML plastic cup is less than 0.3 yuan. If it is matched with a matching cup lid and plastic sealing plug, the price of a set is about 0.4 yuan. In an e-commerce store, the reporter found that plastic-wrapped straws are sold at 3 yuan per 100 pieces, while paper-wrapped straws are sold at 4 yuan per 100 pieces. The store said that if the purchase is over 200 yuan, not only can 10 yuan be reduced, but also free straws can be given.

The more environmentally friendly paper cups are priced at nearly 0.5 yuan each. Although they are under the banner of "health and environmental protection", the above-mentioned e-commerce also admitted that these cups have plastic coating technology on the inside and cannot be completely degraded in the environment, "it should be said to be semi-degradable".

How will consumers deal with these plastic beverage cups?

On the Zhihu platform, there is such a question: You bought a cup of exquisitely packaged milk tea on the street. How do you deal with the milk tea cup after drinking it? The vast majority of netizens said "throw it away directly."

Weak environmental awareness

Transformation has achieved little results

Faced with increasingly serious plastic pollution, some beverage stores have made transformations and tried to use non-plastic products, but the store staff are not sensitive to the problem of plastic waste.

Although Starbucks has introduced a system of bringing your own cup discounts, the reporter did not find any relevant discount signs in the three stores investigated, and the store staff would not explain the discount when customers bought drinks.

At noon on May 23, the Starbucks store was crowded with chatting customers, and almost everyone had a cold drink in their hands. When the reporter asked whether ceramic mugs could be selected for dine-in, the waiter at the Chaoyang Joy City Starbucks store said that there were no mugs in the store; and the clerk at the Tongzhou Wanda store agreed to use ceramic cups only after confirming with the supervisor.

In another Costa coffee shop with a similar positioning, although the store prepared a large number of ceramic coffee cups for dine-in, during the half-hour observation of the reporter, no customer sitting in the store used ceramic cups. When the reporter ordered, the clerk also directly defaulted to using plastic cups.

In a popular beverage store in Chaoyang Joy City, the store arranged a waiter to guard the dining area and clean up the garbage on the table in time. Although the plastic cups used by this beverage store are clearly marked with the words "recyclable garbage", and there are three trash cans erected in the small store, the waiter did not separate the plastic garbage from the domestic garbage when collecting the garbage. Instead, he poured them all into one trash can, and the recyclable and non-recyclable garbage were completely mixed together.

In another beverage store that specializes in freshly squeezed juice, the reporter found that there were several recycling bins placed on the ordering counter to uniformly recycle the plastic packaging of the straws removed by customers. However, these recycling bins are useless: one became a trash can, with paper towels and packaging bags thrown randomly; others became storage bins for new straws.

During the investigation, the reporter also asked the clerks of some beverage stores to use paper cups, but almost all of them were rejected for similar reasons, that is, "for hot drinks only."

In addition to the plastic products that must be used, the large number of plastic bags generated by beverage shops is also worth noting.

Although some shops provide paper bags for takeout, most businesses only provide plastic bags when only one drink is packed. At a beverage shop near a movie theater, the clerk will not ask customers whether they want to pack up, but will directly put the drinks in plastic bags and hand them to customers.

Beijing citizen Kang Xing often orders takeout drinks and has accumulated many takeout paper bags. "Paper bags are still useful, but I usually don't keep plastic bags because the opening is small and they can't hold much."

Every time Kang Xing and his friends order takeout drinks, he will pick up a large bag of garbage, "basically all plastic packaging. Straws, cups, packaging bags, seals, and they are stuffed directly back into the plastic bags after drinking. It is difficult to find a place to reuse these things. They are thrown away after drinking. They are truly disposable."

Plastic waste is rampant

Threat to human health

Currently, the consumption of plastic straws is alarming. The United States discards about 500 million plastic straws every day, and the total length of them connected can circle the earth two and a half times.

"Straws are mostly used in the catering industry. They are mainly made of polypropylene. This material has the advantage of heat resistance and can withstand high temperatures of 130¡æ. It is a plastic that can be put into a microwave oven, so it can be used to drink hot drinks." Huang Ying, an associate professor at the School of Energy and Environment of Southeast University, said that polypropylene has good chemical stability. In addition to being corroded by concentrated sulfuric acid and concentrated nitric acid, it is relatively stable to various other chemical reagents, so straws are extremely difficult to degrade naturally.

Statistics show that, including plastic straws, more than 8 million tons of plastic waste enter the ocean every year, causing serious impacts on marine life, fisheries, and tourism, and causing economic losses of 8 billion US dollars. Plastic waste causes the death of millions of seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals and countless fish every year.

Studies have shown that if the current situation is left unchecked, by 2050, the weight of plastic waste in the ocean will exceed the total weight of fish.

Plastic waste not only harms marine life, but may also threaten human health. Plastic waste will gradually break up in the ocean, forming a large number of microplastic particles with a diameter of less than 5 mm. The toxic and harmful substances contained in the microplastic particles themselves and the toxic and harmful substances adsorbed in the water will accumulate through the food chain and may eventually enter the human body.

Penny Lindeck, a molecular biologist at the Plymouth Institute of Marine Research in the UK, said in an interview with Xinhua News Agency that the "plastic ban" will help consumers change their habits of using plastic straws, and consumers will soon be able to adapt to alternatives. If more and more companies promote alternatives such as paper straws, the cost of substitution may decrease, and the cost factor will not make it difficult for businesses to comply with the "plastic ban".

Since 2018, China has completely banned the entry of 24 types of solid waste, including waste plastics. Eric Solheim, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, believes that China's crackdown on the import of plastic "foreign garbage" is a signal to wealthy countries that they should strengthen recycling and reduce non-essential products such as plastic straws.

Analysts believe that ordinary consumers should be encouraged to minimize the use of disposable plastic products such as plastic straws.

On World Environment Day in 2018, Solheim issued an article calling on consumers to refuse to use disposable plastic products, buy recyclable goods, and develop reasonable consumption habits in life. Consumers cannot just play the role of participants, but should also become a driving factor in promoting behavioral changes of suppliers and retailers.

In this regard, many industry insiders interviewed believe that relevant departments, industry associations, etc. should increase publicity on the plastic restriction order. At present, disposable plastic products commonly used in the takeaway industry and the catering industry have seriously increased the environmental burden. Therefore, the government and associations should guide enterprises and consumers to reduce the production and consumption of disposable plastic products. For enterprises, they should follow the trend and consensus of green environmental protection and produce disposable products that are easy to degrade or easy to recycle as much as possible.

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