Turn crisis into opportunity, ancestral wisdom tells us

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, we have acquired unconventional habits, including wearing face masks almost daily, ordering takeouts and staying at home. Many experts have predicted the pandemic will not subside soon, not before a vaccine or designated drugs can be developed. But, life has to go on with or without the disease. The survival instinct has carried mankind thus far and, for sure, it would help us ride out the storm. However, those unconventional habits, if left unchecked, will leave us a physical legacy that would take up to 1,000 years to go away — plastic waste.

First on the list are the millions of non-degradable face masks being used and dumped around the globe each day. Thousands of millions more masks are on the way as the world keeps churning them out to fend off the virus to buy enough time for a cure.

How we eat has become another behavior that contributes to this legacy. According to a Hong Kong food delivery chain, orders on its platform had doubled in the first quarter of this year, while the number of diners surged by 30 percent to 6,500 in January alone. Bucking the trend of staff layoffs to cushion the economic strain, the company hired 1,000 more delivery men recently, and plans to employ a further 3,500 by the end of the year.

One man’s gain is another man’s loss. This time, it’s mankind’s loss. Evidently, increased orders in the fooddelivery sector have taken the utilization of single-use plastic to a climax.

Hong Kong’s daily volume of discarded plastic dining wares at its landfills has gone up by some 30 percent in four years — from 131 tons a day to 169 tons. On the other hand, a longterm independent variable on the government’s radar — polyfoam dining wares, mostly used in takeaways picked up by customers or delivered by restaurant staff — have been steadily decreasing since 2015, from 48 tons per day to 41 tons daily in 2018 — down by 14.6 percent in four years.

To ensure food is safe and sound and avoid negative customer response, food delivery tends to use more plastic packaging utensils and single-use dining ware than takeouts picked up by customers or delivered by restaurants. Undoubtedly, this has worsened the situation.

Apart from the food-delivery sector, many e-commerce platforms are gaining momentum amid the pandemic, with people staying at home and practicing social distancing. The trend is not unique in Hong Kong — it’s also observed on the Chinese mainland, where a lot of traditional industries turn to online platforms or livestreaming for a way out. But, the more people purchase online, the more packaging waste, plastic or not, we’re producing.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t buy as this would be unrealistic. However, the feverish shopping craze could, in fact, be a chance for people to come up with creative ways to deal with such a large amount of garbage we’ve created. It could also be a chance to force food-delivery companies to use biodegradable materials for packaging.

We can’t simply quench thirst with poison. This plastic waste might be out of sight now, but they’ll be eventually crawling back to your mouth. According to a study by World Wildlife Fund, an international green advocate, humans on average use about 5 grams of plastic weekly, after which they’re buried in landfills and then break into invisible microplastic.

At the end of the day, it all boils down to the traditional belief of Chinese people — turning crisis into an opportunity. That’s exactly what online platforms and those switching to livestreaming are doing. And that’s how it has been done for centuries and how we should handle it this time for the sake of the planet and mankind as well.