Recently, the Chongqing Green Volunteer Federation sued the three major food delivery platforms, Ele.me, Meituan Waimai, and Baidu Waimai, accusing them of failing to fulfill their responsibilities when providing services to consumers, resulting in waste of resources and environmental pollution. The Fourth Intermediate People's Court of Beijing has announced that it will accept the appeal.

This is just a microcosm of the current dilemma of food delivery garbage. Recently, an environmental debate caused by food delivery garbage has continued to ferment. More and more people have focused their attention on the environmental pollution caused by food delivery garbage such as plastic lunch boxes and plastic bags. Some people even lamented that "food delivery destroys the next generation." Food delivery platforms have been widely criticized and even taken to court.

After the industry expanded rapidly, public opinion continued to pay attention, and government supervision was like a "Sword of Damocles" hanging overhead. How to deal with the environmental pollution caused by food delivery garbage has become a problem that all parties in society have to face.

The dilemma of takeaway garbage disposal

According to the 40th "Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet" released by the China Internet Network Information Center, as of June this year, the scale of online takeaway users in China reached 295 million people. With the popularity of online ordering, the use of disposable tableware has also increased significantly.

"The total amount of disposable tableware in China is currently about 1 million tons," said Zhou Lili, senior engineer of the General Business Department of the China Plastics Processing Industry Association, pointing out that most of the takeaway tableware is plastic products.

Because these plastic products are thin and light, most of them do not have much recycling value and can only flow into garbage treatment plants, or be incinerated, or compressed and landfilled. Du Jiangang, secretary of the Party Branch of Beijing Majialou Sorting and Transfer Station, once said that takeaway garbage can generally be classified into two categories: resource type and incineration type. However, it requires professionals to judge which takeaway garbage belongs to the resource type and which belongs to the incineration type.

In actual operation, Liu Kai, the stationmaster of Majialou sorting and transfer station, told the reporter of China Youth Daily and China Youth Online that the garbage transported from various sanitation centers must be sorted by hand and machine in turn.

"The current sorting is to mix plastic bottles and plastic boxes together. The basic amount of plastic bottles and plastic lunch boxes sorted is 3 to 4 tons per day." Liu Kai said that at present, each garbage sorting line in the workshop of Majialou sorting and transfer station has 3 workstations to pick up renewable resources. Due to the fast speed of the belt conveyor, only a small part can be picked out in the end, and the unpicked ones are taken to be incinerated or landfilled.

Both the incineration and landfill treatment methods have been criticized by environmentalists. Plastic lunch boxes are not easy to degrade, and landfilling will cause great pressure on the environment; plastic lunch boxes containing chlorine will produce a first-level carcinogen dioxin after incineration, which is extremely harmful to human health.

Natural degradation takes a long time, recycling is unprofitable, and incineration will cause environmental pollution... The road to dealing with takeaway garbage is full of thorns.

"This problem is a systemic project. To borrow a word from food safety, it requires social co-governance." Sun Baoguo, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and vice president of the Chinese Society of Food Science and Technology, believes that takeaway garbage is not only the responsibility of certain platforms or individuals, but all aspects need to work hard.

Multi-party joint efforts to cope with the problem

A gratifying phenomenon is that all parties are making efforts to cope with environmental challenges.

In 2016, Beijing Environmental Sanitation Group established Beijing Micro Environment Management Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Micro Environment"), which integrates the industrial chain of front-end garbage classification, mid-end garbage transportation, and subsequent garbage treatment. So far, Micro Environment has reached an agreement with 450 communities across China to pilot garbage classification and recycling.

According to the "Beijing Municipal Domestic Waste Incineration Social Cost Assessment Report" released by Renmin University of China in 2017, if classified reduction is implemented, source classification, separate treatment of kitchen waste, and recycling of recyclable resources are achieved, the social cost of domestic waste management can be reduced from 4.22 billion yuan in 2015 to 1.53 billion yuan, a reduction of 64%.

"We have included communities, schools, and units into the system, adopted incentive policies, and encouraged residents to consciously sort garbage, and conduct real-time monitoring through the Internet." Micro-environment Operation Support Specialist Xiang Nanjiang said in an interview with China Youth Daily and China Youth Online that in the past six months, the "wisdom classification model of garbage" has been gradually rolled out to various regions in China. Now there are 932 offline recycling cabinets, covering 16 districts and counties in 5 cities, of which the recycled plastic part totals more than 12 tons.

Relevant government departments have also strengthened the formulation and issuance of safety standards for plastic lunch boxes. On October 19, 2016, the National Health and Family Planning Commission cleaned up and integrated the national food safety standards GB4806.1-2016 "General Safety Requirements for Food Contact Materials and Products" and GB4806.7-2016 "Plastic Materials and Products for Food Contact", and made clear provisions on the general safety and specific safety indicators of disposable lunch boxes. Among them, GB4806.7 is a product standard, which was implemented on April 19 this year; GB4806.1 is a basic standard, which will be implemented on October 19 this year.

Major food delivery platforms have also responded to the society's environmental protection requirements. Previously, Ele.me had launched the "Blue Planet" environmental protection plan, which included providing traffic support to restaurant merchants using environmentally friendly tableware, connecting merchants with high-quality and low-priced environmentally friendly tableware suppliers, etc., and promised to gradually eliminate non-environmentally friendly tableware on the platform. Meituan Waimai also launched the "Qingshan Plan" in September.

In addition, in the second half of this year, under the guidance of the Beijing Food and Drug Administration, the food delivery platform carried out self-inspection and random inspection of disposable lunch boxes, collecting 58 batches of disposable lunch boxes from 48 online merchants from 25 companies, and testing them according to the safety indicators such as total migration, heavy metals, and discoloration experiments specified in GB4806.7-2016 "Plastic Materials and Products for Food Contact".

"From the results of the random inspection, the safety risk of disposable lunch boxes is relatively low." Wang Sanhu, former deputy director of the Food and Drug Administration's Food Supervision Division III and Chief Food Safety Officer of Ele.me, said that in the next step, Ele.me, Baidu Takeaway and other platforms will strengthen the management of takeaway lunch boxes, strictly control the procurement management of disposable lunch boxes, and cooperate with relevant associations to explore and recommend the practices of compliant disposable lunch box manufacturers and strengthen random inspections.

"Social co-governance" still needs a breakthrough

"I think the most critical thing is recycling, which means three things: reduction, harmlessness, and resource utilization." Qu Ruijing, deputy director and chief engineer of the China Circular Economy Science and Technology Achievement Transformation Promotion Center, believes that the current way of dealing with takeaway garbage is still very insufficient, whether it is front-end garbage classification, mid-end transportation or terminal treatment, it is far from meeting the recycling standard.

It is understood that the material of takeaway boxes on the market is mostly PP5 (polypropylene), which is widely used for takeaway packaging because of its advantages such as non-toxicity, high temperature resistance and light weight. However, because of its thinness, its recycling value is also low, and most recycling stations are unwilling to recycle it.

"It's not thick enough now, whether in weight or thickness, including the material, it's still not enough. Only if it's thick can it be recycled, if it's thin it can only be treated harmlessly." Qu Ruijing suggested that from the perspective of the extended producer responsibility system, the food delivery platform, as the beneficiary, should assume social responsibility and make its own standards for the lunch boxes. The platform is better to have its own recycling and processing industry chain to form a closed loop of recycling.

This "closed loop" is exactly what Xiang Nanjiang and Liu Kai are working towards. "If the entire collection and transportation system is unified under one enterprise, it will be possible to achieve the purpose of front-end classified delivery, classified collection, and classified transportation, and finally achieve the purpose of classified treatment." Liu Kai introduced that the entire collection and transportation system in Beijing is currently relatively complicated. The front-end delivery is the responsibility of the sanitation centers in each district, and they are responsible for the transportation from the garbage building to the transfer station and the transportation from the transfer station. The lack of unified management makes it difficult to coordinate.

Xiang Nanjiang also pointed out the same problem. He felt that when cooperating with some communities to conduct pilot projects, the main obstacles came from the street office or property management, which to a considerable extent affected the process of laying offline recycling cabinets.

"The relevant government departments should formulate a rule to establish a recycling and regeneration system for discarded plastic tableware, strengthen management, and do a good job of inspection." Zhou Lili suggested.

As for how to reduce the number of plastic lunch boxes and encourage consumers and food delivery platforms to reuse food delivery boxes, Qu Ruijing shared two systems: the "deposit system" and the "fund system". The "deposit system" is responsible for the consumer side, and consumers can only get their deposit back if they return the food delivery boxes; the "fund system" is responsible for the food delivery platform, platform merchants and other corporate sides, which set up a special fund for recycling and processing to pay for the costs required for recycling.

"Only by integrating green consumption into the entire sales process of enterprises can every consumer be truly involved in recycling." Qu Ruijing said that the "deposit system" and the "fund system" can be used in combination to allow enterprises and consumers to share responsibilities. The government should strengthen legislation and supervision and assume management responsibilities, so that a pattern of "social co-governance" can be gradually formed.

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