Plastic Film Pollutes Farmland amid Absurd Regulatory Tug-of-War
I. The Sudden Mulch Film Crisis
All Old Li can do is head into the shed with a few hired hands to pick up the pieces. “This film is so light and brittle—it must be substandard, ultra-thin mulch.”
Left untreated, the fragments will work their way into the soil during ploughing. Not only would this stunt this season’s crop, but the plastic would be impossible to recover or biodegrade. Instead, it would slowly break down into microplastics in the ground, eventually taken up by the plants themselves.
How did Old Li, who doesn’t use mulch himself, end up a victim of plastic pollution? The culprit emerged on 25 December last year, when a temporary processing plant was erected just 100 metres from his field’s edge. Covering barely a few dozen square metres, the small facility buys in large quantities of peanut vines from local farmers, grinds them up, and turns them into roughage for livestock. Because the vines were not cleaned of mulch before purchase, the plastic, still tangled around the stems, was fed straight into the machinery. Once shredded, the mulch was carried by the wind across neighbouring farmland, including Old Li’s.
The plant was hastily assembled after the peanut harvest on land that had previously served as the village’s protected basic farmland. Given its makeshift nature, the site lacked any supplementary containment measures, allowing the plastic fragments to scatter unchecked.
On 1 January 2025, Old Li called the 12345 municipal government hotline to report the pollution. He subsequently submitted written accounts to the local sub-district office, the Ecological Environment Bureau, the Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, and other relevant departments.
More than two months have passed since the trouble began. The season for sowing spring wheat is upon us, and Old Li had also planned to plant peas, garlic, rapeseed, and Chinese cabbage, which would form the backbone of his annual income. Yet the mulch in his soil has stalled his planting schedule. With the window for sowing rapidly closing, he faces missing the season entirely and forfeiting a year’s earnings.
Old Li used to be a supplier of agricultural inputs, long accustomed to the harm that pesticides, chemical fertilisers, and plastic mulch films cause to both people and the soil. Fifteen years ago, he leased arable land in his home village of Nuomizhuang. Adopting ecological farming practices, he grew cereals and vegetables without resorting to pesticides, chemical fertilisers, or herbicides. This 70-mu plot is the pristine sanctuary he has worked so hard to protect over the years. It is precisely for this reason that he feels such profound dismay at the plastic mulch pollution that so many farmers have come to accept as business as usual.
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When the processing plant refused to take action, Old Li was forced to dig into his own pockets. He handed over 2,000 yuan to the village party secretary, who then passed the money on to the plant’s owners. The owners subsequently erected a rudimentary windbreak along the edge of his fields. The plant also initially agreed to fund the village collective to hire workers to collect the plastic film blowing into Old Li’s crops. However, the effort fizzled out after a few days, with the company claiming they simply “could not afford daily collection.” The company had no intention of halting operations, yet as long as production continued, more plastic film would drift across his land every day. Having exhausted every other avenue, Old Li saw no option but to continue lodging complaints with the authorities.
II. The Agriculture and Environment Departments Engage in a Remote Standoff
In their respective replies, each department maintained that pollution caused by plastic mulch film fell outside its remit. As such, neither could take enforcement action against the companies involved, suggesting instead that the issue be referred to the other department for resolution.
Meanwhile, the Agriculture and Rural Affairs Bureau only cited the fourth sentence: “The ecology and environment departments of local people’s governments at or above county level shall be responsible for the supervision and management of pollution prevention and control in the recycling and re-use of agricultural plastic films.”
In other words, along the chain where inadequate film recovery leads to pollution, each side only sees the other’s dereliction of duty, turning a blind eye to their own responsibilities.
Secondly, one of the key sticking points in their turf war fought through official correspondence is: Does the plastic mulch polluting Old Li’s fields still legally count as “plastic mulch”?
The Ecology and Environment Bureau suggested handling the matter under Article 88 of the *Soil Pollution Prevention and Control Law*: “Where producers, sellers or users of agricultural inputs fail to promptly recover packaging waste for agricultural inputs such as fertilisers, or agricultural plastic films, as required… the agricultural and rural affairs departments of local people’s governments shall order them to make corrections.”
The Agriculture and Rural Affairs Bureau responded that feed-processing enterprises do not fall under the category of producers, sellers, or users of plastic mulch, hence “our department has no legal basis to handle this.” Furthermore, citing Article 102 of the *Law on the Prevention and Control of Environmental Pollution by Solid Waste*, they argued this constitutes “solid waste pollution” and should be penalised by the ecology and environment authorities.
Put simply: In this case, what blew onto Old Li’s fields is no longer legally classified as plastic mulch, but as solid waste.
“Solid waste” refers to materials generated in production, daily life, and other activities that have lost their original utility, or that, despite retaining some value, have been discarded or abandoned.
However, the Ecology and Environment Bureau outmanoeuvred them, using the *Solid Waste Law* to counter the very same legislation. They cited Article 64 of the same act: “The agricultural and rural affairs departments of local people’s governments at or above county level shall be responsible for guiding the construction of the recycling and utilisation system for agricultural solid waste, encouraging and guiding relevant units and other producers and operators to collect, store, transport, utilise and dispose of agricultural solid waste in accordance with the law, and shall strengthen supervision and management to prevent environmental pollution.”
In plain terms: While solid waste falls under my jurisdiction, agricultural solid waste remains the Agriculture and Rural Affairs Bureau’s problem.
Caught between these two replies, Old Li was left utterly helpless. He continued to lodge complaints through government website feedback portals and hotline services. To date, the matter remains entirely stalled.
III. Which department is actually responsible for agricultural solid waste?
Yet the very presence of discarded film at processing sites inevitably stems from inadequate collection efforts in the fields. In 2023, for instance, a procuratorate in Chengde, Hebei, ordered local agricultural and rural affairs authorities to fulfil their supervisory duties over film usage and collection after widespread plastic film use in a village led to arable land contamination.
The logic linking collection and pollution is straightforward: collect the film, and there is no pollution; leave it, and contamination follows. However, at the governmental level, collection falls to the agricultural department, while pollution control sits with the environmental department. Their responsibilities mirror two sides of the same coin. When a contamination incident occurs, failures are inevitable across both stages of responsibility, meaning both departments bear some culpability and have grounds to step in and regulate.
In practice, however, “everyone’s duty” has devolved into “no one’s duty”. Despite the state introducing a slew of regulations—including the *Solid Waste Law*, the *Soil Pollution Prevention and Control Law*, and the *Measures for the Administration of Agricultural Films*—it appears that the more provisions there are, the easier it becomes for relevant departments to find excuses to shirk responsibility.
According to a solid waste researcher, the *Solid Waste Law* offers only vague guidance on the management of agricultural solid waste, leaving the actual regulatory framework for such materials effectively empty.
Agricultural films, including mulch film, rank as the fourth major agricultural input after seeds, pesticides, and fertilisers. Decades of prioritising application over collection have left China grappling with severe film pollution: nearly 20 million hectares of land are covered annually, consuming close to 1.45 million tonnes of film, which accounts for approximately 75% of global usage.
Constrained by a range of technological and equipment limitations, China’s agricultural film recovery rate has long lagged behind two-thirds. In 2017, the former Ministry of Agriculture issued the *Action Plan for Agricultural Film Recovery*, launching a pilot programme to establish 100 demonstration counties in the north-west for film management. The plan aimed to push seasonal recovery rates in these counties above 80% within two to three years.
Though concrete steps have finally been taken to tackle film pollution, they focus solely on “seasonal” collection. Meanwhile, the cumulative residue of mulch film across China has already surpassed one million tonnes.
Monitoring data from the Ministry of Agriculture in 2016 revealed that every film-covered agricultural plot in China contained some degree of residual film. In certain areas, residue averaged between 60 and 300 kilograms per hectare, with some patches exceeding 450 kilograms per hectare—equivalent to six layers of film. Leftover plastic disrupts soil structure, hinders seedling emergence, restricts root development, and ultimately reduces crop yields. To date, no authoritative figures exist to quantify the direct economic losses inflicted on national agriculture by decades of accumulated film residue.
Writing in 2019, Zhang Bin and colleagues from the Rural Economic Research Centre at the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs noted that residual film remains a particularly acute problem outside national pilot zones. Ultra-thin film continues to flood the market, and farmers show little incentive to collect and return used plastic.
Yan Changrong, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, once estimated in an article that stripping mulch from peanut haulm before using it as animal feed costs between 30 and 50 yuan per mu. Yet this cost is rarely covered, meaning the film is left to disperse into the environment, becoming a significant source of plastic pollution.
When mulch fragments end up mixed into the feed, they pose numerous health risks to livestock, which can prove fatal in severe cases, ultimately undermining the economic viability of the farms.
Plastic mulch does not only degrade soil and disrupt agricultural practices; film blown by the wind also threatens public infrastructure. During the May Day holiday in 2021, high-speed rail services on the Beijing–Guangzhou line were halted when mulch became tangled in the overhead catenary wires near Dingzhou in Hebei province, causing dozens of other trains to be delayed or cancelled.
Reports such as “mulch film brings high-speed rail to a standstill” merely scratch the surface of what the public knows. Staff from both the sub-district office and the district agriculture and rural affairs bureau have told Mr Li that incidents of similar plastic pollution are so frequent in the area that authorities simply cannot keep up.
Mr Li’s primary demand now is for an assessment of the contamination levels in his and his neighbours’ fields, followed by scientifically guided soil remediation. This should address not only the visible fragments of mulch film but also the invisible microplastics.
“I have been persistently raising this issue not just for myself, but for the villagers around me, and above all for the well-being of future generations,” he said. “This generation should not leave behind nothing but a landscape ravaged by neglect.”
For Mr Li, turning to the internet was an act of desperation after traditional channels failed to yield results. Yet recent developments have only heightened his anxiety: following his appeals to local authorities, the implicated processing plant has ramped up operations, sending even more mulch film drifting into the air. He suspects the owners are rushing to finish processing the current batch before making a quick exit. Since the facility was hastily erected on farmland, they could simply pack up and vanish without a trace.
Tackling plastic mulch film pollution demands not only a clear delineation of responsibilities among government departments, but also practical solutions and comprehensive management protocols.
Who is accountable? What steps should be taken? Old Li deserves an answer, and so does the contaminated land.
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With thanks to Zhang Miao, Liu Jinmei, and Tian Jing
for their assistance in preparing this article
Edited by Foodthink