A human resources specialist, yang said that she will spend more than last year by buying more this year. For the festival is on sunday, and yang expects to receive almost 20 boxes as gifts from her colleagues, friends and family members, comparatively more in amount to what she will give.
Lu shoujun, neighborhood recycler, predicts that the mooncake season will have more trash. In another 10 days, he will be flooded with calls from his regular customers to collect the empty mooncake boxes with their cardboard, newspapers and other common items. He also said that some people receive so many that he has to heave them from their apartments down. China is quickly transforming to an urban nation from a rural one, and officials are urging for rebalancing the economy, so that a bigger share of gross domestic product is accounted by consumer spending.
The environmental costs are increasing, along with growing numbers of on the rise of city dwellers, who have created vast new business opportunities while showing eagerness to buy fancier things. The united states has been beaten by china in becoming the world&39s largest trash producer. China produces more than 260 million tons per year. 20 million residents in beijing produced about 18,000 tons per day, which is used for landfills. In the city, household trash volume increases by 5 annually and authorities are building new incinerators, although it has caused concern about the smoggy skies of the capital being dirtied further.
The problem of refusing mooncake is a small part. However, it is attracting attention from activists like christmas wrapping in the west.
They seek to encourage greener business practices, raise public awareness, and nudge bureaucrats for implementing environmental regulations, which are already on the books. The president of the china assn. Of bakery & confectionery industry, zhu nianlin said that the nation is expected to produce 280,000 tons of mooncakes this year as the sales reach 2.53 billion, which is an increase of 6 from last year, as reported by the china&39s global times newspaper. However, there is much more growth reported by highend mooncake purveyors. More than 300 million have been spent by mooncake sellers on packaging in 2010.
According to the china general chamber of commerce, that includes 40,000 tons of tin and 200,000 tons of paper. Friends of nature, which is a beijingbased environmental group, said that over 95 of packaging is unnecessary, and although the material is recyclable, the process involves energy and adds to air and water pollution.
China&39s zero waste alliance has launched, this year, a campaign for getting sina weibo users, which is the nation&39s twitterlike microblog service, to take pictures of mooncakes that have excessive packaging. Photos will be collected by the group as planned and a list will be compiled of the most egregious offenders. Urban solid waste coordinator for friends of nature, tian qian, stated that they need to change the habits of customers and manufacturers, more importantly, as they are initially involved. Moreover, some companies, they believe, have been violating the national law.
China adopted regulations many years ago on mooncake boxes. The guidelines included the cakes should occupy 40 of the box volume and the wrapping should be of only three layers. The package cost should be 25 or less of the wholesale cost of cakes. However, tian pointed out that the plastic trays under the cakes and the bags for the boxes do not count as layers according to government inspectors.
The neighborhood recycler, lu said that increasingly elaborate packaging requires more work and low profit for him. He and his workers, most of the times, have to make use of knives to separate the paper of the boxes from the plastic and other materials like fabric, wood, leather and ceramic tile. Lu who is 40 years old had cut off his staff to two men from four this year and also washes cars as a parttime job. He said that labor costs have increased, while the price for the materials decreasing. At times, the stuff has to be just thrown out.
Excess packaging underwrites solid waste and contributes to fuel use for transportation, increasing air pollution. Several beijing residents moan about the mooncake mania adding traffic a week before the midautumn festival. This is because people go around the town buying cakes, delivering them and picking up other cakes along with vouchers that have been given by their friends or employers. City officials said that the traffic congestion index of the capital has on tuesday hit 9.8 out of 10 on tuesday, which is the worst reading of the year. Httparticles.latimes.com2012sep29worldlafgchinamooncakes20120930
