Open your phone and move your fingers, and hot food will be delivered to your door. This scene must be familiar to everyone. It is the emergence of online food delivery platforms that has given us such convenience. However, while we enjoy the convenience, a large number of takeout boxes and packaging bags are challenging our ecological environment with the momentum of "siege".

The takeout market is booming and "white garbage" is besieging the city

On a weekday afternoon, the reporter walked into a large office building in downtown Guangzhou. Just after lunch, the trash cans in the building were completely occupied by "white garbage". Reporter: Is there a lot of plastic?
Cleaner: Yes, they are all lunch boxes.

Sanitation worker: The total amount is large, there are more plastic bags, and most of the transparent ones are foam, so the workload must be larger. Guangzhou citizens: On average, there is once a day, and twice a day.

In order to save costs, merchants mostly use disposable plastic lunch boxes when delivering takeout. Even lunch boxes made of environmentally friendly materials are often treated as disposable items and thrown away after use, with a very low recycling rate. Takeaway deliveryman: Most of them are foam, about 60%.

Guangzhou citizens: Basically, they are disposed of as garbage after use.

So, how much environmental cost does it cost to order a takeaway like this? Data from the three major takeaway platforms, Meituan Takeaway, Ele.me, and Baidu Takeaway, show that the total number of daily orders has exceeded 20 million. Assuming that only one plastic bag and one plastic lunch box are used for one takeaway order, and each plastic bag and plastic lunch box is 0.06 square meters, it is roughly estimated that the area of waste plastic generated by each ordering platform every day can reach 2.4 million square meters, which is approximately equivalent to 336 football fields.

Environmentally friendly lunch boxes are in an awkward recycling situation, and the benefits are too low and policy support is needed

Data shows that currently only 14% of plastic packaging in China is recycled. Now, in addition to environmentally friendly paper tableware and polypropylene (PP) tableware, the lunch boxes provided by takeaway merchants also include disposable foam tableware that was lifted four years ago. What are their recycling conditions?

At a waste recycling station in Guangzhou, the reporter saw that the recycling station of dozens of square meters was full of cardboard, plastic bottles, rotten copper and iron, etc., and citizens brought things to sell from time to time. Guangzhou citizens: The useless ones in the restaurants are collected and sold, and sometimes lunch boxes are also available. Reporter: Plastic transparent lunch boxes? Guangzhou citizens: Yes, yes.

Reporter: What about the foam plastic lunch boxes? Guangzhou citizens: We don¡¯t want foam ones. Why not? The reporter learned that the waste recycling station does not accept foam tableware at all. The person in charge of the waste recycling station: We don¡¯t accept foam lunch boxes, because foam takes up space. Waste recycling staff: It¡¯s useless, we don¡¯t accept it, we accept rotten cardboard.

At this waste recycling station, the person in charge told reporters that the reason for not wanting to recycle is that the foam plastic lunch boxes are too thin and too light. A large bag is only two or three pounds, which takes up too much space during transportation. In addition, cleaning and sorting require a lot of manpower, and the labor cost is very expensive now. In contrast, the recycling of transparent plastic lunch boxes is much more convenient, about one yuan per pound. The person in charge of the waste recycling station: You pour out the leftover food and don¡¯t need to wash it after pouring it out. Don¡¯t take the black ones, only the transparent and white ones. For a large number of foam tableware that no one recycles, experts said that if companies want to recycle and reuse, it is too expensive to invest in environmentally friendly and pollution-free treatment systems, so this type of takeaway garbage can generally only be incinerated. If you want to encourage the recycling of recycled resources such as discarded plastics, you need to establish a corresponding subsidy mechanism.

Ruan Hongru, Secretary-General of the Guangzhou Renewable Resources Industry Association: Include recyclables separated from domestic garbage in subsidies for public services, such as sorting costs, transportation costs, and processing costs. Subsidies will be provided for related costs at each link.

Low cost and slow degradation make it difficult to manage "white garbage"

Convenient to use and low cost make "white garbage" continue to proliferate. However, theoretically, it takes 470 years for a plastic bag to degrade. How to fundamentally solve the problem of "white pollution" has become a global challenge.

According to statistics from the environmental department, China's annual plastic production is 3 million tons, but its consumption is more than 6 million tons, and a large amount of plastic products are imported every year. The world's annual plastic waste is 15 million tons, and China has reached more than 1 million tons.

Gao Haiyang, professor at the School of Materials Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University: Plastic bags, such as ordinary plastic bags, are generally used to package food. They are less harmful to us. Generally, their main component is polyethylene. The second type is the plastic bags that we carry when we go to the vegetable market to buy vegetables. These plastic bags are more commonly used, but generally cannot be subjected to high temperatures, which are toxic. Things like foam, this kind of general (component) is polystyrene, that is, PS (material).

Reporter: Which one can degrade these three types of plastic bags and plastic packaging?

Gao Haiyang, professor at the School of Materials Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University: These three types of plastic bags are basically not degradable. Professor Gao Haiyang said that plastics are polymers formed under high temperature and high pressure conditions, with stable physical properties at room temperature and acid and alkali corrosion resistance. This makes plastics very tolerant, but also leads to extremely slow degradation, and there will be no change even if they are left for a hundred years.

Gao Haiyang, professor at the School of Materials Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University: Sunlight includes moisture, including water vapor. Some bacteria in the soil cannot act on it, so it cannot be degraded. Therefore, if you put it underground for many years, at least more than a hundred years, it will remain intact. Experts say that most disposable plastic products cannot be recycled, especially plastic bags. Because recycling is difficult, companies believe that there is little value in recycling, and generally landfill with garbage. Over the years, how to deal with the large amount of accumulated plastic waste has become a common challenge facing the world.

Fast food packaging cannot be just "short-term"

According to statistics, the average use time of a takeaway fast food packaging is less than half an hour, and it takes hundreds of years to degrade these plastic wastes. For cities that are already facing the problem of garbage siege, hundreds of years are not enough. Therefore, facing the garbage disposal problem caused by fast food packaging, it is obviously not just "short-term". It also requires the government, the public, and enterprises to work together. On the one hand, we need to improve production access standards, strengthen environmental awareness, and reduce production and use; on the other hand, we need to support the industrialization of garbage classification and recycling and effectively control white pollution.

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