Small packaging, big pollution: how to cure it at the root? Scale is the key
China is a major producer and user of pesticides, and pesticide packaging is mainly small packages. It is estimated that the pesticide packaging needed each year reaches 10 billion pieces (items), and more than 3 billion pieces (items) of pesticide packaging waste are discarded at will. These non-degradable small packages and residual pesticides cause "big pollution" to soil and water bodies, affecting the quality of agricultural products and human health.
This year, the Ministry of Environmental Protection issued the Measures for the Administration of the Recycling and Treatment of Pesticide Packaging Waste (Trial), requiring pesticide manufacturers, as the main body, to be responsible for the recycling and treatment of packaging waste. But in reality, the level of farmers' participation largely determines the success of pesticide packaging waste recycling. Without farmers' participation, the cost of collecting waste packaging scattered in the fields will be enormous.
Therefore, it is crucial to help farmers develop the habit of recycling pesticide packaging waste and strengthen their environmental awareness. In the initial stage, mere publicity and education have little effect, and it is necessary to find the right entry point of interest incentives, such as DuPont's "10 waste packages in exchange for 1 Kangkuan product of the same package size" and Haoyang's 1 mao 5 to recycle 1 pesticide waste bottle. This method of giving farmers certain material rewards, while mobilizing farmers' enthusiasm, also strengthens farmers' environmental awareness and has achieved relatively good results.
However, this method also has shortcomings. First, it increases the burden on enterprises, and some small and medium-sized enterprises may be overwhelmed. Second, once material rewards weaken or are no longer enough to mobilize farmers' enthusiasm, the phenomenon of discarding pesticide packaging waste at will may rebound.
In fact, the root of the problem of discarding pesticide packaging waste at will lies in the current small-scale, decentralized household operation of agricultural production in China. In order to adapt to farmers' small-scale production needs, pesticide enterprises mostly use small packaging. These small-size packages are mostly plastic products, difficult to degrade and difficult to recycle, and even after recycling they are difficult to reuse.
Therefore, the fundamental solution to recycling pesticide packaging waste lies in moderately scaled agricultural production. In this way, pesticide application work can be undertaken by socialized service organizations for unified prevention and control, carrying out large-scale operations, and correspondingly pesticide packaging will become large barrel packaging measured in liters. Changing from small packaging to large packaging not only facilitates recycling and reuse, but also reduces enterprises' recycling costs, and is itself a means of reducing packaging waste.
However, under the current situation in China, which has not yet entered the "era of large-scale farmers," relying only on one or two enterprises to voluntarily recycle packaging waste means their capacity is limited. Pesticide packaging waste is different from ordinary garbage and needs to be handled through a specialized recycling system. This requires farmers, dealers, and pesticide enterprises to form a joint force, and the government should do the basic work well, such as formulating laws and standards and building centralized hazardous waste disposal centers. Places with sufficient financial resources should also explore establishing a fiscal input mechanism for the recycling and treatment of pesticide waste packaging, so as to leverage more social capital to participate in this work.