Mouthing Off | Hong Kong’s Covid-19 germ paranoia is terrible for the environment. It’s time to embrace bacteria – for your health and the planet’s sake

Plastic waste has skyrocketed during the pandemic, with people using too many takeaway food trays and plastic bottles, and wrapping groceries in plastic bags

All this is related to a fear of germs, but they can actually be good for our gut health and immune system, so let’s do our planet, and ourselves, a favour

Reading Time:2 minutes

People using more plastic bags than needed when grocery shopping has become a significant source of plastic waste in Hong Kong during the pandemic. Germs can be good for our health, so let’s stop wrapping everything in plastic and embrace bacteria. Photo: Yik Yeung-man

Published: 4:45pm, 5 Oct 2022

I was shopping at a branch of the Hong Kong supermarket chain Wellcome the other day, and in front of me was a woman with a trolley filled with items that had each been put into their own clear plastic bag – even the sealed products and pre-packaged goods like tubs of yogurt, cartons of milk and tin cans.

Such obscene wastage is common, with people commonly unspooling far more of these see-through produce baggies than they need for their groceries. The reason behind this is a paranoia surrounding germs – and the idea that more bags means less chance of infection.

Over the past couple of years, there’s been a huge amount of waste produced in the form of face masks, alcohol wipes and PPE materials used once and then tossed to end up in landfills.

While this may have been necessary to prevent the spread of a potentially deadly virus, our pandemic practices – including using too many takeaway containers when the city’s restaurants were closed – have undone a lot of environmental progress made in the years before Covid-19.

The transparent produce bags commonly found at supermarkets are being used by some to individually wrap groceries. Photo: SCMP

What’s more, the 50-cent (US$0.06) plastic levy for larger plastic bags is now frequently ignored, with store clerks handing them out without a thought – even with items like bottles of water.

We’re also buying single-use bottles of water because many public water fountains in Hong Kong have been out of service for two years. Can the Leisure and Cultural Services Department please turn these taps back on, or are they worried about weirdos licking water dispensers at playgrounds?