Industry insiders said that reducing the use of plastic straws is currently the easiest to achieve, and the design of the cup lid can be changed and replaced with paper straws. However, to reduce the use of plastic lunch boxes, there are problems such as high cost of degradable lunch boxes, shortage of raw materials, and difficulty in recycling.

Beijing News reporter learned that plastic lunch boxes are currently widely used in China, mostly made of PP, PS, PET and other materials. According to Xiang Boxi, lunch boxes made of the above materials are all recyclable, that is, the lunch boxes can be recycled and crushed and then reused. However, the current awareness of garbage classification among residents is still in its early stages, and recycling is still not easy. The cost of degradable tableware is 1-2 times that of ordinary plastic lunch boxes. Catering companies, especially fast food companies, have limited profits. If the price of packaging materials rises by 1-2 yuan, it will be directly reflected on consumers.

"For the replacement of plastic straws alone, large catering companies need to increase costs of tens of millions of yuan; if the existing non-degradable disposable plastic tableware is fully replaced as required, large catering companies will increase the cost of tableware by hundreds of millions of yuan." At this year's National People's Congress, Hong Mingji, member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and president of Yoshinoya, proposed that the catering industry should be allowed to postpone the implementation of the "Opinions on Further Strengthening Plastic Pollution Control". He believes that catering companies will increase the huge and unaffordable packaging costs, which is a serious economic pressure on the catering industry hit by the epidemic.

Hong Mingji wrote in the proposal that according to the information provided by the plastic tableware supplier, the current domestic raw material for producing degradable disposable plastic table