Happiness is a plastic bag

A display at YATA

I know as a whitefella in Australia there was a stereotype about Chinese people loving plastic bags. I don't know where this stereotype originated, because quite honestly, it seems like most people from ANY culture love plastic bags. I think about six billion of them get used annually in Australia, for a population of 22 million, so that certainly isn't the responsibility of the 2% or so of Australians of Chinese origin.
So it was interesting coming to Hong Kong and learning about the debates about packaging here. There seem to be two forces at work. Historically it seems that Hong Kong folks have loved plastic packaging for its ability to keep things hygienic (which I think gets to be a bit more of an issue in a hot humid climate than it does in the dry climate of Melbourne, where stuff tends to dry out, rather than go mouldy or breed bacteria) as well as its convenience. This is now under mild siege from the green lobby, which sees much of this packaging as contributing to the landfill problems in Hong Kong, as well as squandering fossil fuels, polluting the oceans, killing wildlife etc etc.
This leads to a situation where if you shop at a major supermarket, then you are encouraged to bring your own bag, and get charged for any (large) plastic bag that you need. I even have checkout staff thanking me when I bring my own bag, as if I am doing them a favour by saving them the few cents that the store would otherwise be spending on a bag. As with most legislation, it cannot cover all situations and so the majority of market stalls and other small retail outlets give you bags for everything and anything. Even at the supermarkets, it seems to be traditional to bag up potentially messy items (such as dairy products) in extra plastic bags, so it takes a strong sense of determination, as well as keeping your wits about you, to head out on a shopping trip and come back with NO extra bags. After trying to say 'no bag' in Cantonese, and have people look at me in puzzlement, I got smart and asked T., who is from this neck of the woods, and she told me that most people would say 「唔晒」(m saai). This works much better, and these days I manage to avoid a good 80% of the bags that people attempt to give me!

Potatoes at CitySuper

Even despite the plastic bag issue, there is a lot of enthusiasm for packaging. While you are starting to find the individually-wrapped-servings-within-a-packet creeping in with things like biscuits, at Australian supermarkets, it is still the exception rather than the rule. Here I'd say it is the other way round, and I have to read the package scrupulously (if it is in English and not in Cantonese, Japanese, or some other language) to try and avoid the double packaging. Again, I think some of this comes from the humid climate, where a packet of biscuits could probably get kind-of yucky if you had them sitting around for too long.
More weird though, is the need to package up fruit and vegetables individually. This ranges from open-air markets, where this is rare, but not completely absent, to a store like YATA (Japanese department store) where everything seems to be wrapped-to-the-max (see above). This seems to be more true with things that bruise easily, like apples, which sometimes have there own little polystyrene foam 'jacket', but really, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of rhyme or reason to it. The most ridiculous example had to be, though, the individually wrapped and priced potatoes at my favourite store, CitySuper in Shatin. Though I love the range they have, I try and avoid buying vegetables there, because I'm actually not that worried if a bit of dirt from a potato gets on my bag, and if it needs a wash before I cook with it, well I can do that too.
What has to be kept in mind with all this, is that from a climate change perspective, this packaging thing is small potatoes (pun intended). HongKongers, with their public transport use and high density living, have much smaller carbon footprints that almost anyone living a Minority-world lifestyle anywhere on this planet, no matter how many plastic bags they get through in a year. And be honest with yourself, don't you secretly admire the neatness of that display of potatoes?!?