Small Pesticide Packaging Causes Big Pollution, and the Root Solution Lies in Scale
China is a major producer and user of pesticides, and pesticide packaging is mainly small-sized. It is estimated that the number of pesticide packages needed each year is as high as 10 billion (pieces), and more than 3 billion (pieces) of discarded pesticide packaging waste are thrown away 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 Recovery and Treatment of Pesticide Packaging Waste (Trial), requiring pesticide manufacturers, as the main responsible parties, to take charge of the recovery and treatment of packaging waste. But in reality, the level of farmers' participation largely determines the success of pesticide waste packaging recovery. Without farmers' participation, the cost of collecting discarded packaging scattered in the fields would be enormous.
Therefore, it is crucial to help farmers develop the habit of recycling pesticide waste packaging and to strengthen their environmental awareness. In the initial stage, simple publicity and education are not very effective, and it is necessary to find the right entry point of incentive-driven interests, such as DuPont's “10 waste packages exchanged for 1 Kangkuan product of the same packaging specification” and Haoyang's recovery of 1 pesticide waste bottle for 1 jiao 5. 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 unable to bear it. Second, once material rewards weaken or are no longer enough to mobilize farmers' enthusiasm, the phenomenon of arbitrarily discarding pesticide waste packaging may rebound.
In fact, the root of the problem of arbitrarily discarding pesticide waste packaging lies in the current small-scale, dispersed, household-by-household operation of agricultural production in China. In order to adapt to the needs of farmers' small-scale production, pesticide enterprises mostly use small packaging. These small-specification packages are mostly plastic products, hard to degrade and hard to recycle, and even after recovery they are hard to reuse.
Therefore, the fundamental solution for the recovery of pesticide waste packaging 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 recovery and reuse, but also reduces enterprises' recovery costs, and is itself a means of reducing packaging waste.
However, at present, when China has not yet entered the “era of large-scale farmers,” relying only on one or two enterprises to spontaneously carry out the recovery of waste packaging has a limited scope of capacity. Moreover, pesticide waste packaging is different from ordinary garbage and needs to be handled through a specialized recovery system. This requires farmers, dealers, and pesticide enterprises to form a joint force. The government should do the basic work well, such as formulating laws and standards and building centralized disposal centers for hazardous waste, and places with sufficient financial resources should also explore establishing a fiscal input mechanism for the recovery and treatment of pesticide waste packaging, so as to leverage more social capital to participate in this work.