SHANGHAI—Thin _plastic bags_ 
(http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=how-are-polymers-made)  are used for everything in China and the  Chinese use up to three 
billion of them a day--an environmentally costly habit  picked up by 
shopkeepers and consumers in the late 1980s for convenience over  traditional cloth 
bags. Fruit mongers weigh produce in them, tailors stuff  shirts into them, even 
street food vendors plunk their piping hot wares directly  into see-through 
plastic bags that do nothing to protect one's hands from being  burned or 
coated in hot grease. They even have a special name for the plastic  bags found 
blowing, hanging and floating everywhere from trees to rivers:  bai se wu le, or 
"white pollution," for the bags' most common  color. 
Yet, the Chinese government is set to ban the manufacture and force  
shopkeepers to charge for the distribution of bags thinner than 0.025  millimeters 
thick as of June 1—and no one seems prepared. "I don't know what  we'll do," 
Zhang Gui Lin, a tailor at Shanghai's famous fabric market, tells me  through a 
translator. "I guess our shopping complex will figure it out and tell  us what 
to buy to use as bags." 
His wife adds: "Maybe it will be like this," tugging a thicker mesh orange  
plastic bag she is using to carry some shoes. Such thicker bags may prove one  
replacement for the ubiquitous thinner versions. 
The clothes makers are not alone. "I don't know actually," says a vendor of  
Chinese tamales, known as zong zi, who declined to give her name. "I'm  sure 
the government will come up with a solution. Maybe people will just eat it  
[the zong zi directly.]" 
The Chinese government is banning production and distribution of the thinnest 
 plastic bags in a bid to curb the white pollution that is taking over the  
countryside. The bags are also banned from all forms of public transportation  
and "scenic locations." The move may save as much as 37 million barrels of oil 
 currently used to produce the plastic totes, according to China Trade  News. 
Already, the nation's largest producer of such thin plastic bags,  Huaqiang, 
has shut down its operations. 
The effort comes amid growing environmental awareness among the Chinese  
people and mimics similar efforts in countries like Bangladesh and Ireland as  
well as the city of San Francisco, though efforts to replicate that ban in other  
U.S. municipalities have foundered in the face of opposition from plastic  
manufacturers. 
More than one million reusable cloth bags have already been sold on various  
Chinese merchandising Web sites, according to Taobao.com, and local  
environmental groups, such as Shanghai Roots & Shoots, are promoting and  giving away 
cloth bags in schools. 
"Too many plastic bags is a great waste of natural resources," retired  
Communist Party cadre Liu Zhidong says through a translator. "When burnt, they  
produce poisoning smoke, and if buried underneath the ground they need more than  
300 years to be degraded." 
But it remains to be seen how strong enforcement will be. Specific penalties  
have not been set but will include fines. Other environmental efforts—such as 
a  similar ban on disposable wooden chopsticks (a waster of trees) and 
so-called  "green GDP," or gross domestic product, an effort to account for 
environmental  costs when calculating overall economic development— fell by the 
wayside because  they proved too difficult to implement and created significant 
opposition at the  local level. It also remains to be seen whether some of the 
possible  replacements—thicker or biodegradable plastic bags—will be any better. 
"This is a very good measure to protect the environment. However, whether it  
can last long is still very doubting," chemistry graduate student Oliver 
says.  "And another problem is [that] the so-called biodegradable plastic bags, it 
 seems, cannot be totally degraded. Whether or not they are really good for  
environment protection in the long run remains  unknown."



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