A Young Farmer in the Beijing Suburbs Is First Stumped by Plastic

In the spring of 2024, as a city office worker who had never done a single day of farm work, I began farming on and off in the Beijing suburbs, tentatively embarking on my agricultural journey. When people around me heard about it, their reactions fell broadly into two camps: one camp found it romantic, calling it a kind of pastoral healing for city dwellers; the other found it gruelling, asking what the point of getting sunburned and rained on was. I had imagined both reactions and was prepared for either.

But once I actually got out in the field, what I first encountered was neither the shattering of pastoral romance nor the hardship of labour, but the very concrete problem of how to deal with plastic.

◉The plot I rented this spring.

Farming Meets Plastic Waste

2024 was my first year of farming, and I rented a plot of ten square metres. By the time I took it on, it was already May. In Beijing’s climate, open-air planting normally begins in mid-to-late March, and those with a polytunnel start even earlier. The land, of course, never sits idle. When the season comes around, the farm owner sublets plots to hobbyist growers, and whatever does not get rented out, they farm themselves. So by the time I collected my keys, the farm manager had already planted chillies on the plot.

That saved me some bother. No soil turning and levelling, no digging furrows or forming ridges—just dig out the chillies and clear the space. After that, all I needed to do was work forty kilograms of sheep manure fertiliser into the ground, and the preparatory work would be done.

The farm’s plots are managed by zones. Mine sat right at the entrance to Zone C, so everyone coming in and out had to pass right by. A young face out in the field, clumsy but buzzing with enthusiasm, soon drew the attention of several of the elderly regulars. They simply stopped at the edge of the plot and struck up a chat with me; when they could not bear to watch any longer, they would take the spade and demonstrate a few swings themselves. One even pressed a big bag of fresh vegetables into my hands on the spot. Fortunately the work was not much—an afternoon was all it took, and with it the awkwardness of being watched came to an end.

Over that year, my farming experience stood at a proud zero, but on the strength of sheer determination I managed to pull the plot through. Come the end of it, the harvest was, generously, “full.” Crunch the rent against the price of the vegetables and you were naturally in the red, but you reap what you sow, and the sense of worth and accomplishment you take from it is not something money can measure.

◉The maize I harvested.

These were my initial memories of farming. A year later I returned to the farm, this time confidently renting a larger plot—twenty square metres.

Armed with that lean stretch of farming experience, I put forward three requirements on plot-selection day: not next to a road, not by a gate, not in a spot where I would stand out. Farming is my time alone to unwind; I really did not want another audience of elderly neighbours, nor to make polite small talk just to keep things civil.

From 1 January 2026, the use of yet another plot temporarily became mine. Over the New Year holiday I rushed off to the farm in high spirits, drawing up this year’s cropping plan. It was only then that it suddenly struck me that the three requirements I had put forward earlier were all secondary.

What actually mattered was the condition of the land. Take my plot, for instance—the ground was littered with plastic waste left behind by whoever had farmed it before.

◉Assorted plastic debris scattered across the ground.

Plastic is genuinely the most convenient material humanity has ever devised, solving countless headaches for those of us living in modern society. In agriculture alone, the use of plastic mulch film has extended farmers’ growing seasons, helped suppress weeds, and reduced the need for herbicides.

But alongside the agriculture-related waste—mulch film, plastic twine, fertiliser packaging—there was more everyday litter: drink bottles, and even the plastic tubing used for IV drips in hospitals. I have no idea how those ended up in the soil.

The plastic on the surface was relatively easy to clear; the trouble was the plastic twine half-buried in the ground. The twine had been used to tie vining crops to their supports, and over successive seasons of turning the soil, the other end had been inadvertently worked into the earth.

◉On the left: plastic twine on the ground, used to tie the climbing-bean supports. This kind of twine was not only buried in the soil but also tangled in dead branches, making it nearly impossible to simply pull free. There were also shards of plastic mixed into the ground, which could only be picked out by hand.

My first attempt at clearing was back in January. The winter ground was frozen solid; a few spade-strokes made only shallow marks, and I did not even catch a glimpse of the twine’s end. In the end I had to give up, planning to come back once the temperature had warmed.

Finally, in March, spring returned. The soil loosened, and ground that had resisted my hardest digging turned soft. I gripped the end of the twine and gave a gentle tug, and the pieces that had been buried came free with ease. I first cleared all the large, visible pieces of plastic from the surface, intending that once I had a spare moment I would work outward, gradually clearing the rubbish along the nearby path as well.

◉A pile of rubbish at the farm. These spots were never designated rubbish drop-off points, but enough people kept dumping there until they became one. In June this year, this pile was finally cleared.

But that plan, too, never materialised. Plastic was almost harder to clear than the weeds that “the spring wind blows and they grow again.” Just getting my own twenty square metres clear felt like it would never end. Every time I thought I had finished, there was a new “harvest”—fragments left behind as larger pieces of plastic broke down. Mixed in with the soil, they took a sharp eye and a light touch to pick out, one by one, with my fingers. The level of care required was almost embroidery-grade.

I Have Developed Plastic Anxiety

I saw a scene in the documentary Zhong Tu: a few people standing on either side of a conveyor belt, picking out pieces of plastic from the compost, one by one. It was time-consuming and labour-intensive. But plastic breaks into fragments and settles into the soil, and apart from manual clearing there is no other option. Who would do that work unless they genuinely cared about the land?

◉A scene from Zhong Tu: a family picking plastic waste out of compost on a conveyor belt. Source: documentary screenshot

These people who look after the land are, in effect, looking after urban consumers too. Research has found that microplastics get “eaten” by crops and eventually work their way up the food chain into the human body. Seeing with my own eyes the plastic fragments I had created myself clinging so stubbornly to the soil gave me a far more tangible sense of what this means.

But human activity seems incapable of stopping the generation of plastic waste, and so I developed plastic anxiety. I then went to a conference on the plastic problem, hoping to catch up on all the ground I had not covered in one sitting, only to find myself lost in a vast maze of information.

After a round of learning, I was, if anything, even more anxious. There were so many things to watch out for and so many pitfalls!

In short, plastic is a vast family, and every type has a complex, tongue-twisting name—polyethylene, polyethylene terephthalate (PET), and so on. An ordinary person simply cannot keep them all straight.

If you want to reuse a container, you also need to know the specific precautions for each type of plastic. Some resourceful netizens have come up with clever hacks. Take the Wei Chuan–Scream oil cruet, for instance: you unscrew the cap from a Scream sports-drink bottle and fit it onto a Wei Chuan bottle to use as an oil dispenser. This works because both the Scream cap and the Wei Chuan bottle body are PP5 (PP5 indicates the item is made of polypropylene, which can be reused repeatedly and withstands high temperatures), while the Scream bottle body, not suited to reuse, simply gets discarded.

But without that knowledge, reusing plastic can easily plant the seeds of health risks.

◉Netizens’ heretical DIY oil-cruet masterwork. Source: Xiaohongshu screenshot

Biodegradable plastic sounds environmentally friendly, but it has not yet delivered on that promise. This kind of plastic requires not only specialised industrial composting equipment (which does not yet exist, sorry) but also a dedicated recycling and processing system (which also does not yet exist, sorry). Without both, it is just as resistant to breakdown as ordinary plastic waste.

◉Biodegradable PLA straws commonly seen here in China. Do you know how they are recycled, or whether local conditions actually support their breakdown? Source: Foodthink

By the time I had worked through all of the above, my anxiety was already in full swing. After all, there was so much to worry about, and the prefrontal cortex is a scarce resource! Modern people want to be healthy, safe, and environmentally responsible, while also saving money and hassle without putting in extra time and energy—how on earth could all of that be had at once? Come to think of it, is that not a trolley problem in itself?

Being torn in both directions, I still hoped to find a systemic solution rather than shouldering the anxiety on my own.

So I did some more research. The only way to tackle the plastic problem is the 3R principle (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle). Every single one of those three R’s is rather disheartening.

The prerequisite for recycling is sorting. We once launched a grand-scale waste-sorting campaign; how it turned out is not something I am in a position to judge. Take the farm I go to, for example. There are bins, and there are drop-off spots that have become second nature—where the management collects everything on a regular schedule. Yet people still toss rubbish wherever they please and make no effort to sort it. A few bins on the farm accept only weeds and dead branches, and they are labelled “Do not dispose of white plastic waste.” And yet plastic keeps turning up inside them. Material that could have gone into compost ends up mixed in with plastic.

◉Waste-sorting infrastructure in many residential compounds is gradually improving, but a great many people still have not developed the habit of sorting when they actually take out their rubbish. Source: Foodthink

Plastic reduction has not produced obvious results either. China is the world’s largest producer and exporter of plastics, and of the four most common types of plastic products, Chinese output accounts for a third. Looking at China’s own data, plastic production is still climbing. In 2019, China’s output of primary forms of plastics stood at 95.741 million tonnes, and its output of finished plastic products at 81.842 million tonnes. By 2025, although the output of finished plastic products had edged down to 79.199 million tonnes, primary forms of plastics had grown to 147.928 million tonnes. So the finished-product figure may have slipped, but plastic pellets as a raw material have risen by more than half.

I also came across some worse news. Plastic is no longer the exclusive product of the petrochemical industry. With advances in technology and industrial transformation, coal chemical industry firms have entered the field as well, bringing more plastic products at lower prices. If recycled plastic loses its price advantage, companies will simply cut back on using it.

After going around in circles with the learning, I felt I had failed—there simply was no external solution.

Can We Break Free from Plastic Dependence?

The other day while I was out in the field, I hit another one of those moments where my composure just falls apart.

I had bought a lightweight shovel. Once the courier delivered it, I took the package and a pair of scissors straight to the farm, planning to open it there. The moment the scissors sliced through the woven polypropylene sack wrapping the shovel, it broke into many small pieces. A gust of wind and they were scattered across the surrounding soil.

◉The lightweight shovel I bought online. That day I went straight to the farm with the packaging still on. A word of advice: absolutely do not open this kind of packaging in the field.

I wanted to pick up every last fragment, but I could manage only a handful. To clean the area completely would probably have taken hours of crouching down in the dirt, eyes wide open, sorting through everything meticulously. On top of that, the plastic generates static electricity, so the pieces stick to my fingers and are nearly impossible to flick into the bin bag—another layer of trouble added. I suspect that to this day, the plastic pollution I created with my own hands has still not been fully cleared.

It was the most mortifying moment I have had since I started farming. In the past, when people criticised me for paying a premium to rent a plot and still not managing it well, I never felt anything like this. The truth is, the shovel was not a necessity at all. The farm provides tools; I simply felt they were not to my liking and impulsively ordered a new one from an e-commerce platform.

It has always been my own fault. Since there is no systemic solution, the best I can do is start with myself and cut back at the source.

It reminds me of a Chinese chess board I once saw outside a family’s home in Tanzania. The pieces arrayed on either side of the river dividing the board were all made from drink bottle caps. The red ones came from Coca-Cola, the green ones from Sprite. Africa’s industrial base is thin, and many goods carry high price tags. For them, crafting a game of Chinese chess from materials within arm’s reach was about as economical as it gets.

◉A Chinese chess set made from drink bottle caps.

In contrast, here at home, the “World Factory” has laid the groundwork for a fully commodified society. Production capacity is locked in a spiral of over-competition; things are made in such excess and at such low prices. On e-commerce platforms, a perfectly good set of Chinese chess costs only a little over ten yuan. Lose a piece? Just get a new set. At that price, very few people stop to think about conservation.

Convenient consumption has quietly reshaped my thinking and habits, too. Whenever I run into a small problem in daily life, my first instinct is to scroll through an e-commerce platform, searching for a ready-made product that will solve it. That is exactly how the shovel came about.

Setting aside whether consumption inevitably leads to waste, in an age where e-commerce platforms dominate how we buy, this kind of casual spending inevitably generates a huge volume of plastic packaging waste. The clear plastic boxes platforms use to ship fruit and vegetables, for instance, are the single most common type of plastic item I receive on a daily basis. It was only after I visited a recycling centre that I learned they had excluded this type of plastic box from their recycling stream altogether.

◉Broccoli at Sam’s Club—each head living in its own “plastic studio.” Source: Wu Xiaowai

What makes consumerism so formidable is its ability to manufacture desire from scratch, getting people to pay for things they do not need at all. Some companies can even turn a plastic toy into a global “idol.” If consumerism came in tiers, China’s over-competitive manufacturers would certainly push it to the absolute limit.

Under the relentless bombardment of advertising and marketing, consumers inevitably lose out to mass-produced desires in the end. The toll that consumerism exacts in the form of waste and plastic pollution is inevitably borne collectively by every ordinary person, yet the moment we reach for our wallets, we choose to look the other way.

Perhaps, if more people were like me and saw with their own eyes the plastic waste strewn across the very land that feeds us, they might take breaking free from plastic dependence a great deal more seriously.

This year has been another bountiful harvest in the field, but I know that if I keep farming next year, my struggle with plastic waste on this piece of land is far from over.