Liu Yonglong’s Shanghai Rendu Ocean NGO Development Centre has spearheaded the collection of 25 tonnes of waste from Shanghai’s coast line since 2007. Calls China’s crackdown on plastic a failure, citing statistics showing more than 60 per cent of trash dumped on mainland beaches is from plastic products.
Liu Yonglong, a native of inland China, had long looked forward to travelling to the seaside and contemplating the country’s marine beauty. But when he finally visited Shanghai’s shores more than a decade ago, what he saw shocked him.
Instead of the “clean and beautiful” oceanside he had expected to find, he saw a beach covered with trash and a sea topped with a thick layer of litter.
“As a person from a hinterland region, I always had an aspiration for the sea,” Liu, who is from the northeast’s Ningxia Hui autonomous region, said in an interview. “But when I stood by the sea, I could not accept that it was so dirty.”
His surprise, anger and disgust drove Liu to launch Shanghai Rendu Ocean NGO Development Centre, a Chinese environmental group that specialises in marine rubbish.
The organisation has mobilised about 10,000 volunteers in 170 events over the past 12 years to collect some 25 tonnes of waste from Shanghai’s coast line in support of its mission – reducing China’s ocean garbage.
Rendu volunteers also present marine environmental education programmes at four primary schools in Shanghai. The organisation also has collaborated with other mainland NGOs since 2015 on a beach-rubbish monitoring project at 25 seaside spots, detailing its findings in an annual report.
More than 60 per cent of trash dumped on mainland beaches is from plastic products, much of it packaging materials from China’s booming food delivery and online shopping sectors, according to Rendu.
That statistic suggests China’s efforts to reduce overall plastic use have largely failed, said Liu, 44, who holds a bachelor’s degree in law from Shanghai’s Fudan University and founded Rendu in 2007 while working at a state-owned enterprise. He quit his “comfortable and lucrative” job six years later to devote himself to the environmental cause.
China’s plastic-heavy marine refuse differs from that of developed countries, where cigarette butts tend to be the dominant item in beach trash, he said.
In 2008, the mainland’s cabinet banned giving free plastic bags to customers at shops, supermarkets and wet markets and said consumers should pay 0.2-0.5 yuan (three to seven US cents) per bag.
But the order – which carried no penalties if violated – seems to have been ineffective, given that Chinese people still widely use bags, boxes, cups and other plastic-made wares, Liu said.
“What’s more, e-commerce, food delivery and other industries that involve plastic foam packaging have been growing rapidly,” he said. “The plastic items used in these sectors have become the top type of wastes on the beaches due to our country’s unsound cleaning and management system.”
The top three rubbish categories – all devoted to plastic products – account for 60-80 per cent of all waste on China’s beaches. Cigarette butts represented less than 4 per cent of the total.
The big problem with plastic rubbish is that is easily breaks into pieces or into particles in the sea or on beaches, Liu said. “It’s difficult to clean them up.”
China’s southern coasts generally have more rubbish on them than the northern ones, reflecting the south’s faster economic development, Rendu’s research shows.
But the authorities’ recognition and support of Rendu in recent years indicates the government is making dealing with marine garbage a priority, Liu said.
In November, China and Canada issued a joint statement acknowledging that plastic pollution harms ocean health and has the potential to hurt human health. The statement stressed the importance of taking a “sustainable life cycle approach” to managing plastics to reduce marine litter.
It is unclear, however, which government department is most responsible for China’s marine litter, Liu said, adding he hoped the government would be “more open and solicit public opinion when facing the marine rubbish issue”.
He is pessimistic, however, that the situation can be turned around quickly.
That view stems both from his own experience as an environmentalist as well as a 2015 study by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a British charity which aims to accelerate the transition to a “circular economy” built on keeping resources in use for as long as possible.
The foundation reported that if no concrete action were taken globally, the ocean would contain one tonne of plastic for every three tonnes of fish by 2025, and by 2050, more plastics than fish [by weight].
“I often cited these findings to raise public awareness,” Liu said.
“It’s a bleak future because I expect there will be more marine rubbish on China’s coast lines in the next few years,” he said. “So it’s urgent for us to act now to stop that trend.”
(Adapted from: SCMP)