China’s popular plastic bag replacement is less green than it seems

(By Caixin journalists Kang Jia and Guo Xin)

Li Jingjing is a firm believer in making use of whatever’s around her. She has repurposed glass bottles into small lamps, cups and tea canisters. She has transformed key chains into handy pill boxes, and turned leftover crab shells into a collage of a fox.

But she is still not sure how to deal with her hoard of nonwoven bags.

Because of her busy work schedule, Li usually gets her groceries delivered by online platforms like Freshippo, Dingdong Maicai and Meituan Maicai. With each purchase, she receives one or two nonwoven bags. She soon found herself with more than 200 at home.

She took photos of her neat stack of bags and posted them to social media with the caption: “Useless to keep, but a pity to discard.”

The post became her most popular post, racking up hundreds of comments, showing that the dilemma of such bags — which may pile up in people’s homes but feel too sturdy to simply throw away — is not just an issue for Li.

These nonwoven fabric bags — which may appear to be made from natural cloth, but are usually made from plastic fibers bound together using heat, chemical methods or mechanical means — became popular due to regulations that cracked down on single-use plastic bags for environmental reasons.

While the public’s perception may be that these durable bags are more sustainable than their disposable counterparts, they are often less eco-friendly than they seem, as they are often not reused enough times to offset the greater resources needed to produce them.

Single-use plastic bags have long been a focus of China’s efforts to curb plastic waste.

A 2020 report by the United Nations Environment Programme estimated that each individual in China used approximately 1,095 single-use plastic bags per year. Once discarded they can persist for up to 400 years without decomposing.

A notice issued by the State Council in 2007 outlined strict measures to limit their use. The notice prohibits the production, sale and use of plastic shopping bags with a thickness of less than 0.025 millimetres.

However, in the following years, the number of such bags being produced, sold and used only grew.

In 2020, China introduced another policy to clamp down on disposable plastic bags. The policy, detailed in a document jointly released by the country’s top economic planner and the environment ministry, banned non-degradable single-use plastic bags in shopping malls, supermarkets and fresh produce platforms in the country’s first- and second-tier cities.

To fill the void, the document called for the promotion of eco-friendly cloth bags, paper bags, and other non-plastic and biodegradable shopping bags.

However, these recommended alternatives failed to take off. Businesses were reluctant to offer them as customers saw them as expensive, poor quality, or both.

Eventually, businesses began to offer nonwoven bags, which were not on the document’s list of eco-friendly bags and were not technically banned either.

Businesses are aware that nonwoven bags are made from plastic, but still promote them as “eco-friendly” and “green”.

A survey by Plastic Free China, a Guangzhou-based NGO, found that only 10% of respondents understood that nonwoven bags are plastic, often believing these bags are made from natural materials like cotton and hemp. They are actually primarily composed of polypropylene, polyester and other petrochemical materials.

Part of the justification for their green marketing is their greater durability compared to single-use plastic bags. However, the greater resources required to make nonwoven bags mean that they need to be reused many times to have less of an environmental impact than their flimsy single-use rivals.

A 2011 report by the UK Environment Agency assessed the life cycles of seven commonly used types of shopping bags, including single-use polyethylene bags, polypropylene nonwoven bags, paper bags and cotton bags. The agency found that three “green bags” — paper, nonwoven and cotton — need to be reused at least 3, 11 and 131 times respectively, to provide a greater environmental benefit than using a single-use plastic bag once.

If used only once and then discarded, a single nonwoven bag consumes 17.8 times more energy and emits 16.7 times more carbon than a disposable plastic bag.

Ji Junhui, a researcher at the Institute of Physics and Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that nonwoven bags being provided in China are becoming increasingly thinner and lighter as businesses look to cut costs. This shift suggests that these bags are evolving towards being “disposable” items.

The environmental bureau of the Chinese island province of Hainan surveyed about 300 consumers, of whom 75% said they would not reuse the nonwoven bags they get for free at places like farmers’ markets, mainly because of their small size and poor quality. Some said they wouldn’t even use them as garbage bags because they tend to leak.

Some environmental scientists argue that tackling plastic pollution should focus on the health and ecological challenges stemming from the indiscriminate release of plastic products into the environment. They emphasise that blanket bans on single-use plastic bags cannot tackle these challenges alone.

According to Professor Wen Zongguo from Tsinghua University’s School of Environment, the first priority should be cutting the amount of waste generated in the first place. This means that substituting one plastic product for another is not enough — actual reuse is far more important.

Once waste is generated, it should be recycled and reused as much as possible, the next step is energy recovery through incineration, and landfilling should be a last resort, he added.

China’s rapidly growing food delivery industry, a major contributor to waste, is beginning to take steps to reduce plastic use.

Reports indicate that most food delivery packaging is single-use, with plastic being the dominant material for containers, utensils and bags, comprising about 80%.

In 2017, food delivery giant Meituan launched the Blue Mountain Project to protect the environment. Huang Peikun, head of the project’s plastic initiative, explained that since 2017, Meituan has offered consumers the option to choose “no cutlery”. So far, more than 410 million users have chosen this option. Based on post-consumption surveys, the actual execution rate of “no cutlery” orders in 2023 is about 63%.

This article was first published by Caixin Global as “In Depth: China’s Popular Plastic Bag Replacement Is Less Green Than It Seems”. Caixin Global is one of the most respected sources for macroeconomic, financial and business news and information about China.

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