The Bag Ban

Earlier this year, the China State Council banned free plastic bags from retailers. Now, in China there's no choice of paper or plastic, it's just plastic, and most of the time those plastic bags are of the ultra-thin, ultra-flimsy variety. We're talking so flimsy that anything over the weight of a single beer requires double-bagging and a fast trip home before the bags break. Once used for transporting your groceries and beer (or just beer), these cheap little bags are delegated to lining your home trashcans (if the bags haven't broken yet) assuming that they're big enough. Most of the time the bags are so inconveniently small and flimsy that any shopping trip would require a dozen of the little things to hoist all your food and are too small to fit in any normal sized waste bin, which is extremely annoying.

The majority of these bags would just end up being thrown away, usually into other, larger plastic bags, but often they would just be left on the street, blocking sewers, interfering with water treatment, polluting the environment or just blowing across the streets in clumps of bags. Like tumble weed, but with bags.

That all changed last month. One of the advantages of a one party government is that you can, without having to fuss through congress, arbitrary opposition from other parties or protests from bag lobbyists. So as of June 1, free bags are banned and all stores carry plastic bags for purchase. You can buy small bags for 0.1 yuan, medium bags for 0.2 yuan and larger bags for 0.3 yuan (6.8 yuan = 1 USD). Then for the real green shopper, cloth biodegradable bags are offered for a few yuan. In addition to potentially saving 37 million barrels of oil if shoppers use reusable bags, the new bags are much, much heftier than the old ones, and they're actually of a normal size that can be useful around the house.

When I first heard about this measure I just assumed that everyone would end up buying these new bags, with a minority of frugal shoppers bringing along their own bags, but that's not the case, at least in Guangzhou. I'd forgotten that China has a savings rate that's 50% of GDP, these guys like to economize. Seemingly overnight, people have started bringing reusable plastic and cloth bags to the grocery stores, with shoppers who purchase bags at the grocery store in the minority.

It was less than two months ago that I felt like I was one of the few responsible shoppers at my local grocer when I'd bring my old bags. Now whenever I forget to bring my old bags to use when shopping, I feel like I'm the irresponsible person in the register line, most people bring their bags. Now if only I can find a good bag storage device.

Guangzhou: World

Entry one.
Guangzhou is a shit hole. I've been here nearly two months, and while I have warmed up to this fomented ass-crack of a metropolis (I used to think the place was ultra-hellish, but then it cooled off a bit in October), it still is a poor excuse for a smudge of habitat for eight million people. Granted there are some redeeming factors. It's a tier one city so hey, you get lots of ethnic restaurants, some fancy bars, famous shows come through every now and then, and some other stuff. Oh yea, and it's near Hong Kong, so you can live cheaply while still going to Hong Kong every now and then to be reminded just how poor you are, and how much of a forsaken shit hole the city you live in is. So my point is, all of the pluses of this city being "tier one" are counterbalance by the fact that is has all the rest of the problems tier one cities has, and doesn't have all of the things a tier one city should have (live music is conspicuously absent.

Let me explain. As the center of the world's biggest production center in the world, you have, lots of factories. Lots of them. Just like daycare centers have lots of children and the Midwest has lots of corn (neither of which I'm particularly fond of) Guangdong has lots of factories. Factories produce lots of things: shoes, bricks, teddy bears, mops, tires, wigs, TVs, pens, lighters, tape dispensers and of course, heaps, heaps and heaps of particulated shit matter. It's safe to say that Guangzhou is the center of one of the world's biggest producers of particulated carcinoharmfulputrigens in the world.

What does this mean for us guys on the ground? Disgusting air. I'm a contact lens wearer so while these foldable saucers of plastic help my eye refract light in a way that is otherwise impossible, thus allowing me the gift of sight, they also collect little tiny pieces of these particulates and then stab them into my iris. They collect dirt, and then press it against my eyeball until it makes a nice red ring around my eye.

Hey but it could be worse, I could live in Yiwu http://www.yiwu-china.org/.