Migrant Worker

Plastic Trash
Originally uploaded by Keith Tam.

This article on the German grocery superstore Metro charging for bags in Kunming from China Central Television (CCTV) floated across my radar today — it piqued my interest since I spent Tuesday trying to track down more information on trash bags in Northwest Yunnan.

I’ve always been vaguely aware of the ban on plastic bags in effect in Lijiang and Zhongdian (technically, all of Lijiang and Deqin prefectures) but never thought much about it until last August, when I travelled to Zhongdian with a friend who asked me what the deal was with the strange pseudo-cloth, pseudo-paper yellow bags we kept getting whenever we bought stuff. I mentioned that plastic was banned and guessed that this was some sort of biodegradable alternative material. We’ve been trying to figure out where these bags are coming from ever since, and it came to a head on Tuesday, when responsible travel company WildChina expressed interest in buying a few.

We’re not having a lot of luck tracking down the supplier of these bags in Northwest Yunnan — online research and some cursory asking around hasn’t even determined for sure if the bags are being distributed by a non-profit, for-profit, or local government. On the other hand, we have learned the following:

The ban on plastic bags seems to have been implemented in 2002. There is some interesting related information in this report from the Yunnan Environmental Protection Bureau, including the fact that .7 million plastic bags were confiscated. The whole report is worth a read if you are into that kind of thing. The backstory of the ban is explained in this article (Chinese) , and basically adds up to the local governments realizing that if millions of domestic and international tourists were going to show up each year and shop, they needed to do something about the pollution. No one wants to go to a world heritage site that has been buried by a waste dump.

In my hunt for more information on the ban on plastic bags (and possible biodegradable replacements) in Lijiang and Zhongdian, I turned up this article on the larger waste issue in Lijiang by Jo Kent, a new friend here in Beijing. She writes simply and honestly about the incredible trash problem here in China, particularly the “just throw it on the ground” culture that prevails everywhere from rural Yunnan to the big city (at a somewhat lesser degree).

Free Chinese Lesson! Biodegradability: 生物降解性 sheng wu jiang jie xing Biodegradable bag: 生物可降解袋 sheng wu ke jiang jie dai Sub in any Chinese noun in the blank to say that thing is biodegradable.