Over-Packaging Crackdown Back in the Spotlight: China's Packaging Industry Turns to Resource Savings and Green Transition

Good packaging is often called half the battle, and in a market economy goods really do lean on the box they come in. Stroll through a mall or supermarket and the shelves are stacked with products whose outer packaging outshines the last: many cartons are lined with imitation gold foil, red silk or yellow satin, while rigid boxes are gilded and painted in bright colours that dazzle the eye. A sales assistant at a tea counter explained that there are as many as a hundred styles of tea caddy alone, with the most exquisite ones naturally fetching the highest prices. With the Dragon Boat Festival approaching, a wave of zongzi brands is hitting the market — and judged on packaging alone, zongzi appear to be following mooncakes down the over-packaging road. The phenomenon is worth pausing over.

There is no doubt that excessive packaging of consumer goods wastes resources and worsens environmental pollution. Figures show that the mooncake boxes produced nationwide each year are enormous in number and consume large quantities of wood-based material, so that a single Mid-Autumn Festival is enough to wipe out a whole stretch of forest. Experts have also calculated that China's annual shirt output is vast, a substantial share of it packaged, and that the paper consumed is equivalent to felling a considerable number of trees — shirts alone, in other words, mean consumers use up a forest's worth of timber every year.

Other statistics indicate that a third of municipal household waste is packaging waste, and more than half of that packaging waste is excessive packaging. In Beijing, the packaging waste generated each year includes tens of thousands of tonnes of excessive packaging, and cutting it back would substantially ease environmental pollution. Nationally, packaging waste now accounts for half the volume of solid waste, and the value discarded annually is considerable; packaging output keeps rising, yet the overall recovery rate lags far behind production.

Surveys show that more than 90 percent of consumers are unwilling to pay for excessive packaging. For the state, society and individuals alike, over-packaging brings nothing but harm; enforcement must be intensified and the trend firmly brought to a halt.

Early in the year, the General Office of the State Council issued a notice on curbing excessive packaging of commodities, stressing that over-packaging not only wastes resources and pollutes the environment but also inflates prices, harms consumers' interests, disrupts market order and encourages extravagance and corruption. Standards, regulations and policies must be drawn up and refined promptly to prohibit the production and sale of over-packaged goods; publicity must be stepped up to mobilise the whole of society against over-packaging; and supervision and inspection must be strengthened.

The national mandatory standard on limiting excessive packaging of food and cosmetics then came into force, setting compulsory requirements on the void ratio, the number of packaging layers and the packaging cost of sales packaging for food and cosmetics, including limits on packaging layers and void ratio and a cap on the total cost of all packaging beyond the primary pack as a share of the retail price. More than a year after it took effect, the results are far from encouraging. Experts say the reason is that the standard is merely a textual restriction on enterprises, with no penalty provisions once a violation occurs, which makes it difficult to enforce.

Not long ago, in a report on implementing the findings of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress' law-enforcement inspection, the National Development and Reform Commission proposed that the relevant regulations would be refined and issued promptly.

Experts argue that curbing over-packaging should draw on the experience of other countries and follow the principle of combining source control with end-of-pipe treatment: source control means reducing and limiting packaging through standards and legislation, while end-of-pipe treatment means recycling it and turning it back into a resource. Japan, for example, requires that packaging costs stay within a set proportion of the selling price, while South Korea classifies excessive packaging as an illegal act punishable by a substantial maximum fine. In tackling over-packaging, both consumers and manufacturers bear an inescapable responsibility. Society as a whole should be guided towards rational, green consumption, thrift should be encouraged and extravagance criticised; enterprises, for their part, should strengthen the idea of plain packaging, oppose over-packaging and favour moderate packaging, so as to save costs and conserve resources.

——This article is reprinted from China Packaging Network (pack.cn); original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-369973.html