The Mid-Autumn Festival is approaching, and mooncakes are on sale. However, in recent years, the "overpacking" of mooncakes has become more and more intense, often resulting in unnecessary waste. Take a moon cake I bought before the holiday as an example. There are eight layers of packaging inside and outside, involving paper bags, metal, plastic and other materials. The net weight of the moon cake is only 34% of the total weight.
Every year during the golden sales season of moon cakes, manufacturers compete to "contend for beauty" and do their utmost luxury in packaging. The price of moon cakes generally rises, making ordinary consumers discouraged. The "wearing gold and silver" of this kind of seasonal food not only transfers the cost to consumers, but also brings a lot of unnecessary environmental pollution and waste of resources. After the festive feast ended and consumers finished eating moon cakes, the large amount of "beautiful packaging" left was turned into rubbish, causing serious damage to the environment.
For these packaging materials, in the early production process, every kilowatt-hour of electricity and every drop of water consumed has the cost of resources and the environment; After being reduced to garbage, whether part of the packaging materials such as plastic and paper are recycled and reused, or most of the packaging becomes garbage and finally burned or landfilled, the carbon emissions caused by their treatment process, or environmental impacts such as pollution of soil, rivers, and groundwater cannot be ignored; Another part of the packaging has become a land-based pollution source and flowed into the ocean. Wild animals such as marine life and birds are hardly immune. A number of scientific studies have found that microplastics have been found in many organisms. It can be said that this mode of production and consumption is unsustainable.
In response to the waste of resources, excessive packaging, and falsely high prices in the moon cake market, in recent years, many places in our country have carried out many special regulatory actions and achieved certain results. However, just relying on various special rectification actions on moon cakes may not be enough to eradicate the excessive packaging of moon cakes. To make moon cakes "return to nature" and to promote the formation of a production and lifestyle that saves resources and protects the environment in the whole society, it is also necessary to achieve a more fundamental change from the perspective of standards.
The author believes that, in this regard, the national standards for moon cakes and the relevant national standards for standard packaging are promising. The current national standard for mooncakes (GB/T19855-2015) replaced the original 2005 standard (the “old national standard”), and the “old national standard” stipulated that “the cost of packaging should not exceed 25% of its ex-factory price” was cancelled. Instead, moon cake production and business units are required to pack moon cakes reasonably in accordance with the standard requirements of the "Restrictions on Excessive Packaging of Commodities-Food and Cosmetics".
In the past five years, we have continuously conducted market research on the packaging of Mid-Autumn Mooncakes and sent the mooncakes that are clearly over-packaged by relevant consumers for detection. However, it is a pity that even if the packaging that has been visually inspected has reached nearly ten layers, the detected results are almost always "the number of packaging layers does not exceed three layers." Similarly, it can be seen from media reports that there are very few cases of “overpacking” in the inspection results of the special rectification actions for moon cakes in various places.
So, why is there such a big difference between common sense and inspection results? This is related to the method of calculation. Although the national standard stipulates that "the number of layers of the packaging is below three layers", it looks beautiful; it also stipulates that the initial packaging directly in contact with the product is regarded as the zeroth layer, and the original packaging that completely wraps the product is recorded as the first layer. In this way, such as pallets, plastic bags, etc., are counted as the zeroth layer; similarly, the outermost bags, iron boxes, etc., are not counted. Therefore, it is not surprising that ordinary people intuitively think that mooncakes are over-packaged, but the inspection results show that they meet the standard.
Saving resources and protecting the environment is our country's basic national policy. Our country's Civil Code has established the green principle, which clearly establishes "conducive to resource conservation and protection of the ecological environment" as a basic obligation to be followed in civil activities. The "Law on the Prevention and Control of Environmental Pollution by Solid Wastes" that came into effect on September 1 this year clearly stipulates that producers and operators should comply with mandatory standards that restrict excessive packaging of goods and avoid excessive packaging. As the technical support for economic activities and social development, as well as the basic system for the modernization of the national governance system and governance capabilities, standards have a lot to do in promoting ecological civilization and green development. The author expects that relevant national standards can keep pace with the times and be revised in a timely manner, and in the process of revision, change the previous situation that was completely drafted by manufacturers and industry interest representatives, and fully introduce the participation of the public and social organizations, and give the public interest representatives the responsibility of supervision.
(Zhou Jinfeng, the author of the original Chinese article, is the Secretary-General of China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation.)
(Photo credit: Pixabay)
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Original Chinese article:
http://share.gmw.cn/difang/2020-09/24/content_34219466.htm
Translated by / Maggie
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