Food takeaway has become a symbol of urban lifestyle convenience in China, but the resulting single-use plastic (SUP) waste has become a costly environmental and economic burden. In 2020, urbanites ordering on food delivery apps generated 37 billion SUP containers and a small fraction was recycled. According to a report by Pacific Environment, 88.5% of SUP waste in China is landfilled, incinerated, or leaked to the environment. Food and beverage packaging is the number one contributor to China’s SUPs.  

This blog is modified from the Wilson Center-OSU “Cultivating US and Chinese Climate Leadership on Food and Agriculture Roadmap” publication. 

“Waste is something that most of us just don’t see,” stressed Pete Pearson, Senior Director, Food Loss and Waste, WWF, at a recent Wilson Center event. Though people are “conditioned” to be blind to food waste, continued Pearson, this not-so-invisible problem wastes a third of food grown around the world. When this wasted food decomposes, it emits methane, accounting for 8 to 10% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

China is the world’s largest emitter of methane, a short-lived climate pollutant that traps 80 times more heat than carbon. Coal mining, agriculture, and food waste are China’s three biggest methane emitters. Among them, food waste holds the most promise for near-term climate action. 

Recycling in the United States is failing. Only 50 percent of packaging is currently recycled. For plastics the rate is lower, only nine percent. The U.S. packaging recycling rate is far below many other countries and has been stagnant for over a decade because our waste management infrastructure is fragmented, inefficient, and underfunded. U.S. city and county governments spend millions of taxpayer dollars each year to manage an expanding and increasingly complex array of packaging waste they had no input in designing or creating. U.S. recyclers are struggling with poorly designed packaging that cannot be recycled and adds cost to the recycling system, and brand owners are unable to source the recycled content they need to honor their public sustainability commitments. Under the current system, consumer packaged goods companies have little incentive to change. 

Over decades, billions of small lentil-sized plastic pellets, called nurdles, flooded out of the wastewater pipes of Formosa Plastic’s plant in Calhoun Texas into the Gulf of Mexico. For decades, Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation fisherwoman in a rural fishing town called Seadrift, has been tracking and collecting data on the company’s nurdle pollution. In 2019, after three years of constant sampling, she and her scrappy volunteers won a dramatic legal victory with a consent decree mandating 50 million in penalties for past pollution and fines if they do not clean up previous pollution or maintain zero discharge of plastic.