Plastic Mulch Pollutes Farmland Amid Absurd Regulatory Standoff | Republished & Follow-up
Foodthink Says
Two days after publication, WeChat removed the original post, stating it had received a complaint that the content breached the *Provisions on the Management of Information Services for Public Accounts on the Internet*. Articles posted by Foodthink on other platforms were subsequently taken down. Given the public interest the piece has generated, and to preserve a basis for public discourse, we are now republishing it with specific locations redacted, while retaining the maximum amount of information possible.
Although the article drew the attention of relevant departments upon release, there has been no tangible progress on remediation or accountability. Following directives from the local sub-district office, the processing plant nearest to the affected farmer has removed its machinery and raw materials from the cropland. The soil at the temporary processing site and stockpile yard was subsequently tilled, burying the plastic fragments underground. Nevertheless, two peanut vine processing businesses continue operations in the same village. As of today, the local ecological environment and agriculture and rural affairs departments continue to cite unclear jurisdictional authority and have taken no action against the implicated enterprises. Affected farmers fear that as processing traces and evidence of soil contamination disappear, holding the responsible parties to account will only grow more difficult. To date, soil samples have only been collected and sent for testing from the plots contracted by Mr Li, the affected farmer. Soil remediation has yet to begin.
I. A Sudden “Film” Calamity
Old Li has no choice but to gather a few workers to pick up the film scraps in the shed. “The film is so light and brittle—it looks like substandard, ultra-thin plastic,” he says.
If left untreated, the film will be mixed into the soil during ploughing. This would not only stunt the growth of the current crop but also render the material impossible to recover or decompose. Instead, it would only slowly fragment into plastic pieces within the soil, potentially being absorbed by crops in the form of microplastics.
How did Old Li, who doesn’t use plastic film himself, become a victim of its pollution? The answer lies in a temporary processing plant that began operations on 25 December last year, just 100 metres from the edge of his field. Covering only a few dozen square metres, the small facility buys large quantities of peanut vines from neighbouring farmers, shreds them, and processes them into roughage for livestock feed. Because the vines were not stripped of their plastic film before purchase, the film, tangled around the vines, was fed straight into the machinery along with them. The shredded plastic was then blown by the wind across nearby farmland, including Old Li’s plots.
The plant was hastily erected after the peanut harvest on land that was originally designated as the village’s prime farmland. Given the makeshift conditions, no additional containment measures were put in place at the site, allowing the plastic fragments to scatter unchecked.
On 1 January 2025, Old Li called the 12345 municipal hotline to report the pollution. Since then, he has submitted written reports to local authorities, including the sub-district office, the Ecology and Environment Bureau, and the Agriculture and Rural Affairs Bureau.
More than two months have passed since the incident began. The season for sowing spring wheat is upon us, and Old Li had also planned to plant peas, garlic, rapeseed, and pak choi simultaneously. Once harvested, these would form the bulk of his annual income. Yet the plastic littering his fields has delayed planting, putting him at risk of missing the sowing window entirely and jeopardising a year’s worth of earnings.
When the processing plant refused to take any action, Old Li was left to foot the bill himself. He handed 2,000 yuan to the village secretary, who passed it on to them. In return, they erected a makeshift barrier along the edge of his field. The plant had also promised to cover the costs of hiring locals to collect the plastic mulch film blowing into Old Li’s crops, but the arrangement was abandoned after just a few days on the grounds that “picking it up every day is more than we can bear”. The company is reluctant to suspend operations, yet as long as production continues, plastic mulch film will blow over daily. Having exhausted every other avenue, Old Li had no choice but to keep lodging complaints with the authorities.
II. A ‘Distant Duel’ Between Agriculture and Environmental Departments
In their respective replies, both agencies maintained that pollution caused by plastic mulch film fell outside their jurisdiction. Consequently, neither could take enforcement action against the company involved, with both insisting the matter should be passed to the other department.
Conversely, the Agriculture and Rural Affairs Bureau only referenced the fourth clause: “The ecological environment departments of people’s governments at or above the county level shall be responsible for supervising the prevention and control of environmental pollution arising from the collection and reuse of agricultural film.”
In other words, when it comes to the chain of events linking poor film collection to pollution, each department sees only the other’s dereliction of duty, while turning a blind eye to its own responsibilities.
Secondly, a key point of contention in their protracted, indirect debate centres on a simple question: does the film polluting Mr Li’s fields still legally count as “agricultural film”?
The Ecology and Environment Bureau proposed applying Article 88 of the *Law on the Prevention and Control of Soil Pollution*: “Where producers, sellers or users of agricultural inputs fail to promptly collect packaging waste or agricultural film as required… the agricultural and rural affairs department of the local people’s government shall order them to make corrections.”
The Agriculture and Rural Affairs Bureau countered that a feed-processing enterprise is neither a producer, seller nor user of agricultural film, meaning “our department has no legal basis to take action”. It then cited Article 102 of the *Law on the Prevention and Control of Environmental Pollution by Solid Waste*, classifying the issue as “solid waste pollution” that falls under the jurisdiction of the ecological environment authorities.
Put plainly: in this case, the material that blew onto Mr Li’s land is no longer legally classified as agricultural film, but as solid waste.
“Solid waste” refers to discarded items generated through industrial, domestic or other activities that have either lost their original utility, or are discarded despite retaining some value.
Yet the Ecology and Environment Bureau proved one step ahead, turning the *Solid Waste Law* against itself. It invoked Article 64, which states: “The agricultural and rural affairs departments of people’s governments at or above the county level shall be responsible for guiding the development of a recycling and utilisation system for agricultural solid waste, and shall encourage and guide relevant entities and other producers and operators to collect, store, transport, utilise and dispose of agricultural solid waste in accordance with the law, strengthening supervision to prevent environmental pollution.”
Put simply: solid waste may fall under my remit, but agricultural solid waste remains the Agriculture and Rural Affairs Bureau’s problem.
Caught between these contradictory replies, Mr Li is left utterly exasperated. He has continued to raise the issue through government website portals and telephone hotlines, but to date, the matter remains completely stalled.
III. Who, exactly, is in charge of agricultural solid waste?
Yet the presence of discarded mulch film in processing facilities is inevitably a downstream consequence of inadequate field-level recovery. In 2023, the Chengde procuratorate in Hebei Province directed local agriculture and rural affairs authorities to step up their oversight of mulch film application and collection after widespread use in one village led to cultivated land contamination.
The logic is straightforward: collect the film, and you prevent pollution; leave it behind, and contamination ensues. Yet at the administrative level, collection falls under the agriculture and rural affairs department, while pollution control sits with the environmental authorities. Their mandates are two sides of the same coin. When contamination does occur, breakdowns have inevitably happened in both domains. Each agency bears some responsibility, and each has grounds for stepping in.
In practice, though, “everyone’s job” has conveniently become “no one’s job.” Despite the introduction of a suite of national regulations, including the Law on the Prevention and Control of Environmental Pollution by Solid Waste, the Law on the Prevention and Control of Soil Pollution, and the Measures for the Administration of Agricultural Plastic Films, it appears that the more regulations issued, the more readily authorities find loopholes to pass the buck.
According to a solid waste specialist, the Solid Waste Law’s provisions on agricultural solid waste are deliberately vague, leaving the sector’s regulatory framework effectively non-existent in practice.
Agricultural plastic films, including mulch film, rank as the fourth major agricultural input, following seeds, pesticides, and fertilisers. Years of prioritising application over collection have left China grappling with severe mulch film pollution. Approximately 20 million hectares (300 million mu) of farmland are covered annually, consuming some 1.45 million tonnes of film, which accounts for roughly 75 per cent of the global total.
Constrained by limitations in collection infrastructure and processing technology, the national recovery rate for agricultural film has long languished below two-thirds. In 2017, the then Ministry of Agriculture launched the Agricultural Film Recovery Action Plan, designating 100 pilot counties across northwestern China to spearhead mulch film management. The goal was to achieve an in-season collection rate of over 80 per cent in these pilot areas within two to three years.
While these initiatives finally mark concrete action, they only address in-season collection. Meanwhile, decades of neglect have left more than a million tonnes of residual film accumulating in the soil.
Monitoring data from the 2016 Ministry of Agriculture indicates that virtually every plot of previously mulched soil in China contains some level of film residue. In certain areas, the average reaches four to twenty kilograms per mu, with isolated patches exceeding thirty kilograms—roughly equivalent to six overlapping layers of plastic. This buried plastic fractures soil structure, stunts seedling emergence, restricts root development, and ultimately drives down crop yields. To date, no authoritative data exists on the direct economic losses inflicted upon agriculture by decades of nationwide film accumulation.
A 2019 study by Zhang Bin and colleagues at the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs’ Rural Economic Research Centre further highlights that residual film remains a severe problem outside designated pilot zones. Ultra-thin films continue to flood the market, while farmers show little incentive to collect what is left behind.
Yan Changrong, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, once estimated in an article that stripping plastic film from peanut vines for use as livestock feed costs around 30 to 50 yuan per mu. Rarely is this cost covered, meaning the plastic film is left to scatter into the environment, becoming a significant source of plastic pollution.
When plastic film ends up mixed into animal feed, it adversely affects livestock health, and in severe cases can even prove fatal, thereby damaging the economic interests of farmers.
Plastic mulch film harms not only the soil and agriculture itself, but wind-blown fragments also threaten public infrastructure. During the 2021 May Day holiday, a high-speed train on the Beijing–Guangzhou line was forced to stop in the Dingshou section of Hebei province after plastic film became entangled in the overhead catenary wires. Dozens of other high-speed trains were subsequently delayed or suspended.
News stories like “plastic film brings high-speed rail to a halt” represent only the tip of the iceberg visible to the public. Staff from local sub-district offices and the Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs have both told Old Li that there are simply too many similar incidents of mulch pollution in the area for them to keep up with.
At present, Old Li’s primary demand is for an assessment of the pollution levels in his own fields and those of neighbouring farmers, followed by soil remediation based on scientific evaluation. This would address not only visible fragments of plastic film but also invisible microplastics.
He said: “I have persistently raised this issue not just for myself, but for the villagers around me, and above all for the welfare of future generations. Our generation should not leave behind nothing but a ravaged landscape.”
For Old Li, turning to the internet for help was a reluctant last resort after other avenues failed, yet recent developments have only heightened his anxiety: since he appealed to the authorities, the implicated processing plant has accelerated its operations, releasing even more plastic film into the air. He suspects they are rushing to process the current batch before fleeing. Since the facility was erected temporarily on farmland, they can simply pack up and leave without a second thought.
Tackling plastic mulch pollution demands not only a clear allocation of duties across government departments, but also viable solutions and comprehensive management guidelines.
Who will oversee this? What will be done? Old Li needs answers, and the contaminated land deserves them too.
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With thanks to Zhang Miao, Liu Jinmei, Tian Jing, and Zhou Ya
for their assistance in preparing this article
Edited by: Foodthink