Online food ordering makes people's life more convenient, but also brings a lot of takeout garbage such as plastic lunch boxes and plastic bags. The latest statistics show that the major online food ordering platforms need 40 million lunch boxes a day to order food, which is 14.6 billion lunch boxes a year. What's more, the amount of such waste is still growing rapidly with the popularity of the online food ordering industry, putting great pressure on the environment.

What to do? Some people argue that protecting the environment starts with ordering one less takeaway. But that's not the answer, and it's not very realistic. Some people believe that businesses should reduce the use of disposable food boxes and switch to environmentally friendly food boxes that can be recycled. But the reality is that even for recyclable takeaway food boxes, most of them end up in the trash after just one use. It can be seen that the crux of the problem is "recycling".

At present, China has not formed a complete recycling system, and a large number of low value-added recyclables such as plastic lunch boxes have failed to enter the recycling channel of renewable resources, and are re-mixed into urban solid waste. In addition, the high cost of recycling plastics also limits the willingness of enterprises to recycle. In addition, there is a "cleaning and finishing" process before recycling, and the characteristics of Chinese food are oily and acidic, so recyclers are reluctant to pick up takeout boxes full of oil, because even if they are picked up, it will cost a lot of labor to clean, and the cost of recycling is too high. Few enterprises are willing to do this complicated and losing business.

The existing recycling link in China is not perfect, and the plastic that can not be recycled can only be incinerated or landfill eventually. But unfortunately, many plastic lunch boxes are difficult to sort when mixed with household waste, and simple incineration is easy to produce air pollution; Many landfills can not be sanitary landfill, landfill sites in the city are overloaded, and insufficient recycling capacity is the main problem.

First, we must strengthen hard constraints. We will make legally binding provisions on the reduction and resource utilization of packaging materials sold abroad. In accordance with the principle of "who pollution who governance", in each takeout garbage disposal fee, the purpose is to let businesses, platforms, consumers have to pay for takeout garbage recycling, in the implementation process, but also to prevent businesses and platforms will be all the tendency to pass on to consumers.

Two to innovate recycling channels. Since online ordering is booming relying on the Internet, plastic recycling can also use the power of the Internet. For example, create a new recycling platform of "Internet +" and build a deposit recycling system. When consumers buy takeout food, they first pay some deposit to the platform. After the meal is finished, the takeout food box is sent to the self-service recycling machine or manual recycling point, and the platform will return the deposit to the consumer. At present, 40 countries and regions in the world have implemented the deposit system, covering the categories of beverage bottles, lead-acid batteries, cars and so on. If this system is to be extended to the field of take-out food boxes, related policies must be further improved.

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