It is difficult to be environmentally responsible in Hong Kong.

Packaging is unavoidable in every supermarket. Until recently, you weren’t asked if you would like a bag, it was assumed that you needed one – even to carry a sandwich. McDonalds even gives a plastic bag with a handle to put the drink into.

A couple of weeks ago, a bag levy was introduced. Stores can opt in or out of the scheme and the levy is 50 HK cents, that’s about 10 Australian cents. It only covers bags that have handles so stores now offer bags without handles to carry your shopping so the levy can be avoided. There has been more uproar in the media about the cost of the levy (too expensive) than the stores / shoppers trying to avoid it.

Tomatoes come on a plastic tray which is glad-wrapped. Grapes, kiwi fruit, mushrooms and baby spinach leaves are the same. Some is individually wrapped like mandarins, onions and garlic. The only fruit and vegies that can be bought loose are avocadoes, oranges, apples (sometimes), watermelon, durian, dragon fruit, bananas and zucchini.

The wet markets sell their fruit and vegies loose but the pesticides that are used can make the choice difficult.

I’m not sure what it was like pre-SARS and avian flu. Now that swine flu is here too, the need for added packaging is not likely to end any time soon. There is a view that the more packaging, the safer the product.

This even extends to packs of toilet paper. Each role is individually wrapped and then the pack of eight to twelve is then wrapped together with a convenient plastic handle. The only toilet paper not like this is a one-ply so the added toilet paper required may offset the plastic savings – a tree for a bag.

Yesterday we bought two bedside tables. The shop assistants offered to bring them to the car. Unbeknown to us, this required them to wrap each individually in glad-wrap first.

I now know there are various grades of glad-wrap – domestic, catering and furnishing.

* Thanks to Coldcut for the title to this post.