Environmentalists cheered when China announced recently that it would ban flimsy plastic shopping bags. As of June 1st, supermarkets will be forbidden to give free plastic bags to their customers, a more stringent measure than most developed nations have adopted.
But the War on Plastic Bags has caused some predictable collateral damage, forcing China's biggest plastic bag manufacturer out of business, as the Guardian reports:
The shutdown of Suiping Huaqiang Plastic, which employs 20,000 people, highlighted the social costs of a government drive to clean up one of the world's most polluted environments.
The factory had been producing 250,000 tons of plastic bags annually, making it a key contributor to the growing problem the Chinese have named "white pollution," i.e., the proliferation of plastic bags and Styrofoam containers littering the environment.
Of course, one reason China got so terribly polluted in the first place was its decision to become the world's foremost manufacturer of All Things Plastic. Now, the Chinese government has realized it can't afford to let its industries run rampant. But China's built its whole economy on the mass production of disposable consumer goods. Maybe they could take all the factory workers displaced by the bag ban and put them to work producing, say, non-toxic toys made from sustainably harvested wood, instead of pollution-producing plastic. I hear there's a growing market for that in the U.S.
Learn more about the bane of plastic bags and what you can do about them at worldwatch.org. 
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