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Friday, December 31, 2021
Hindsight Capital Again Made The Year’s Best Trades - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail
Sunday, December 26, 2021
The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning
GOVERNANCE
FUTURISM
The
Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning
Official White House
Photo/Wang Huning observes as Chinese President Hu Jintao speaks with U.S.
President Barack Obama, Toronto
One day in August 2021, Zhao Wei disappeared. For
one of China’s best-known actresses to physically vanish from public view would
have been enough to cause a stir on its own. But Zhao’s disappearing act was
far more thorough: overnight, she was erased from the internet. Her Weibo
social media page, with its 86 million followers, went offline, as did fan
sites dedicated to her. Searches for her many films and television shows
returned no results on streaming sites. Zhao’s name was scrubbed from the
credits of projects she had appeared in or directed, replaced with a blank
space. Online discussions uttering her name were censored. Suddenly, little
trace remained that the 45-year-old celebrity had ever existed.
She wasn’t alone.
Other Chinese entertainers also began to vanish as Chinese government
regulators announced a “heightened crackdown” intended to
dispense with “vulgar internet celebrities” promoting lascivious lifestyles and
to “resolve the problem of chaos” created by online fandom culture. Those
imitating the effeminate or androgynous aesthetics of Korean boyband stars—colorfully referred to as “xiao xian rou,”
or “little fresh meat”—were next to go, with the government vowing to
“resolutely put an end to sissy men” appearing on the screens of China’s
impressionable youth.
Zhao and her
unfortunate compatriots in the entertainment industry were caught up in
something far larger than themselves: a sudden wave of new government policies
that are currently upending Chinese life in what state media has characterized
as a “profound transformation” of the country. Officially referred to as
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “Common Prosperity” campaign, this
transformation is proceeding along two parallel lines: a vast regulatory
crackdown roiling the private sector economy and a broader moralistic effort to
reengineer Chinese culture from the top down.
But why is this “profound transformation”
happening? And why now? Most
analysis has focused on one man: Xi and his seemingly endless personal
obsession with political control. The overlooked answer, however, is that this
is indeed the culmination of decades of thinking and planning by a very
powerful man—but that man is not Xi Jinping.
The Grey Eminence
Wang Huning much prefers the shadows to the limelight. An
insomniac and workaholic, former friends and colleagues describe the
bespectacled, soft-spoken political
theorist as introverted and
obsessively discreet. It took former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin’s repeated
entreaties to convince the brilliant then-young academic—who spoke wistfully of
following the traditional path of a Confucian scholar, aloof from politics—to
give up academia in the early
1990s and join the Chinese Communist Party regime instead. When he finally did
so, Wang cut off nearly all contact with his former connections, stopped
publishing and speaking publicly, and implemented a strict policy of never
speaking to foreigners at all. Behind this veil of carefully cultivated
opacity, it’s unsurprising that so few people in the West know of Wang, let
alone know him personally.
Yet Wang Huning is
arguably the single most influential
“public intellectual” alive today.
A member of the
CCP’s seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, he is China’s top ideological
theorist, quietly credited as being the “ideas man” behind each of Xi’s
signature political concepts, including the “China Dream,” the anti-corruption
campaign, the Belt and Road Initiative, a more assertive foreign policy, and
even “Xi Jinping Thought.” Scrutinize any photograph of Xi on an important trip or at a key meeting and
one is likely to spot Wang there in the background, never far from the
leader’s side.
Wang has thus earned
comparisons to famous figures of Chinese history like Zhuge Liang and Han Fei
(historians dub the latter “China’s Machiavelli”) who similarly served behind
the throne as powerful strategic advisers and consiglieres—a position referred
to in Chinese literature as dishi:
“Emperor’s Teacher.” Such a figure is just as readily recognizable in the
West as an éminence grise (“grey eminence”), in the tradition
of Tremblay, Talleyrand, Metternich, Kissinger, or Vladimir Putin adviser
Vladislav Surkov.
But what is singularly
remarkable about Wang is that he’s managed to serve in this role of court
philosopher to not just one, but all three of China’s previous top leaders,
including as the pen behind Jiang Zemin’s signature “Three Represents” policy
and Hu Jintao’s “Harmonious Society.”
In the brutally
cutthroat world of CCP factional politics, this is an unprecedented feat. Wang
was recruited into the party by Jiang’s “Shanghai Gang,” a rival faction that
Xi worked to ruthlessly purge after coming to power in 2012; many prominent members,
like former security chief Zhou Yongkang and former vice security minister Sun
Lijun, have ended up in prison. Meanwhile, Hu Jintao’s Communist Youth League
Faction has also been heavily marginalized as Xi’s faction has consolidated
control. Yet Wang Huning remains.
More than any other, it is this fact that reveals the depth of his
impeccable political cunning.
And the fingerprints
of China’s Grey Eminence on the Common Prosperity campaign are unmistakable.
While it’s hard to be certain what Wang really believes today inside his black
box, he was once an immensely prolific author, publishing nearly 20 books along
with numerous essays. And the obvious continuity between the thought in those
works and what’s happening in China today says something fascinating about how
Beijing has come to perceive the world through the eyes of Wang Huning.
Cultural Competence
While other Chinese teenagers spent the tumultuous years
of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) “sent down to the countryside” to dig
ditches and work on farms, Wang Huning studied French at an elite foreign-language training school
near his hometown of Shanghai, spending his days reading banned foreign
literary classics secured for him by his teachers. Born in 1955 to a
revolutionary family from Shandong, he was a sickly, bookish youth; this, along
with his family’s connections, seems to have secured him a pass from hard
labor.
When China’s shuttered
universities reopened in 1978, following the commencement of “reform and
opening” by Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping, Wang was among the first to take the
restored national university entrance exam, competing with millions for a chance
to return to higher learning. He passed so spectacularly that Shanghai’s Fudan
University, one of China’s top institutions, admitted him into its prestigious international politics
master’s program despite having never
completed a bachelor’s degree.
The thesis work he
completed at Fudan, which would become his first
book, traced the development of the Western concept of national
sovereignty from antiquity to the present day—including from Gilgamesh
through Socrates, Aristotle, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau,
Montesquieu, Hegel, and Marx—and contrasted it with Chinese conceptions of the
idea. The work would become the foundation for many of his future theories of the nation-state and
international relations.
But Wang was also
beginning to pick up the strands of what would become another core thread of
his life’s work:
the necessary centrality of culture, tradition, and value structures to
political stability.
Wang elaborated on
these ideas in a 1988 essay, “The Structure of China’s
Changing Political Culture,”
which would become one of his most cited works. In it, he argued that the CCP must urgently consider how society’s
“software” (culture, values, attitudes) shapes political destiny as much as its
“hardware” (economics, systems, institutions). While seemingly a
straightforward idea, this was notably a daring break from the materialism
of orthodox Marxism.
Examining China in the
midst of Deng’s rapid opening to the world, Wang perceived a country “in a
state of transformation” from “an economy of production to an economy of
consumption,” while evolving
“from a spiritually oriented culture to a materially oriented culture,”
and “from a collectivist culture to an individualistic culture.”
Meanwhile, he believed
that the modernization of “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” was effectively
leaving China without any real cultural direction at all. “There are no core values in China’s most
recent structure,” he warned. This
could serve only to dissolve societal and political cohesion.
That, he said, was
untenable. Warning that “the components of the political culture shaped by the
Cultural Revolution came to be divorced from the source that gave birth to this
culture, as well as from social demands, social values, and social
relations”—and thus “the results of the adoption of Marxism were not always
positive”—he argued that, “Since 1949, we have criticized the core values of
the classical and modern structures, but have not paid enough attention to
shaping our own core values.” Therefore: “we must create core values.”
Ideally, he concluded, “We must combine the flexibility of [China’s] traditional values with the
modern spirit [both Western and Marxist].”
But at this point,
like many during those heady years of reform and opening, he remained hopeful
that liberalism could play a positive role in China, writing that his
recommendations could allow “the components of the modern structure that embody
the spirit of modern democracy and humanism [to] find the support they need to
take root and grow.”
That would soon
change.
A Dark
Vision
Also in 1988, Wang—having risen with unprecedented speed
to become Fudan’s youngest full professor at age 30—won a coveted scholarship
(facilitated by the American Political Science Association) to spend six months in the United States as a
visiting scholar. Profoundly curious
about America, Wang took full advantage, wandering about the country like a sort
of latter-day Chinese Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting more than 30 cities
and nearly 20 universities.
What he found deeply disturbed him, permanently shifting
his view of the West and the consequences of its ideas.
Wang recorded his observations in a memoir
that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book America Against
America. In it, he marvels at
homeless encampments in the streets of Washington DC, out-of-control
drug crime in poor black neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco, and corporations
that seemed to have fused themselves to and taken over responsibilities of
government. Eventually, he concludes that America faces an “unstoppable
undercurrent of crisis” produced by its societal
contradictions, including between rich and poor, white and black, democratic
and oligarchic power, egalitarianism and class privilege, individual rights and
collective responsibilities, cultural traditions and the solvent of liquid
modernity.
But while Americans
can, he says, perceive that they are faced with “intricate social and cultural
problems,” they “tend to think of them as scientific and technological
problems” to be solved separately. This gets them nowhere, he argues, because
their problems are in fact all inextricably interlinked and have the same root cause: a radical, nihilistic individualism at
the heart of modern American liberalism.
“The real cell of
society in the United States is the individual,” he finds. This is so
because the cell most foundational (per Aristotle) to society, “the family,
has disintegrated.” Meanwhile, in the American system, “everything has a
dual nature, and the glamour of high commodification abounds. Human flesh, sex, knowledge,
politics, power, and law can all become the target of commodification.” This
“commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to a number of
serious social problems.” In the end, “the American economic system has created
human loneliness” as its foremost product, along with spectacular inequality.
As a result, “nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock
to cultural development and the American spirit.”
Moreover, he says that
the “American spirit is facing serious challenges” from new ideational
competitors. Reflecting on the universities he visited and quoting approvingly
from Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, he notes a
growing tension between Enlightenment liberal rationalism and a “younger
generation [that] is ignorant of traditional Western values” and actively
rejects its cultural inheritance. “If the value system collapses,” he
wonders, “how can the social system be sustained?”
Ultimately, he argues,
when faced with critical social issues like drug addiction, America’s atomized,
deracinated, and dispirited society has found itself with “an insurmountable
problem” because it no longer has any coherent conceptual grounds from which to
mount any resistance.
Once idealistic about
America, at the start of 1989
the young Wang returned to China and, promoted to Dean of Fudan’s International
Politics Department, became a leading opponent of
liberalization.
He began to argue that
China had to resist global liberal influence and become a
culturally unified and self-confident nation governed by a strong, centralized
party-state. He would develop
these ideas into what has become known as China’s “Neo-Authoritarian”
movement—though Wang never used the term, identifying himself with China’s
“Neo-Conservatives.” This reflected his desire to blend Marxist socialism with
traditional Chinese Confucian values and Legalist political thought, maximalist
Western ideas of state sovereignty and power, and nationalism in order
to synthesize a new basis for long-term stability and growth immune to Western
liberalism.
“He was most concerned
with the question of how to manage China,” one former Fudan student recalls. “He was suggesting that a strong,
centralized state is necessary to hold this society together. He spent every
night in his office and didn’t do anything else.”
Wang’s timing couldn’t have been more
auspicious. Only months after his return, China’s own emerging
contradictions exploded into view in the form of student protests in Tiananmen
Square. After PLA tanks crushed the dreams of liberal democracy
sprouting in China, CCP leadership began searching desperately for a new political model on which to secure the regime. They soon
turned to Wang Huning.
When Wang won national
acclaim by leading a university debate team to victory in an international
competition in Singapore in 1993, he caught the attention of Jiang Zemin, who
had become party leader after Tiananmen. Wang, having defeated National Taiwan
University by arguing that human nature is inherently evil, foreshadowed that,
“While Western modern civilization can bring material prosperity, it doesn’t
necessarily lead to improvement in character.” Jiang plucked him from the
university and, at the age of 40, he was granted a leadership position in
the CCP’s secretive Central Policy Research Office, putting him on an
inside track into the highest echelons of power.
Wang Huning’s Nightmare
From the smug point of
view of millions who now inhabit the Chinese internet, Wang’s dark vision of
American dissolution was nothing less than prophetic. When they look to the
U.S., they no longer see a beacon of liberal democracy standing as an admired
symbol of a better future. That was the impression of those who created the
famous “Goddess of Democracy,” with her paper-mâché torch held aloft before the
Gate of Heavenly Peace.
Instead, they see Wang’s
America: deindustrialization, rural decay,
over-financialization, out of control asset prices, and the emergence of a self-perpetuating
rentier elite; powerful tech monopolies able to crush any upstart competitors
operating effectively beyond the scope of government; immense economic
inequality, chronic unemployment, addiction, homelessness, and crime; cultural
chaos, historical nihilism, family breakdown, and plunging fertility rates;
societal despair, spiritual malaise, social isolation, and skyrocketing rates
of mental health issues; a loss of national unity and purpose in the face of
decadence and barely concealed self-loathing; vast internal divisions, racial
tensions, riots, political violence, and a country that increasingly seems
close to coming apart.
As a tumultuous 2020
roiled American politics, Chinese people began turning to Wang’s America
Against America for answers. And when a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol
building on January 6, 2021, the book flew off the shelves. Out-of-print
copies began selling for as much as $2,500 on Chinese e-commerce sites.
But Wang is unlikely
to be savoring the acclaim, because his worst fear has become reality: the “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis”
he identified in America seems to have successfully jumped the Pacific. Despite
all his and Xi’s success in draconian suppression of political liberalism, many
of the same problems Wang observed in America have nonetheless emerged to
ravage China over the last decade as the country progressively embraced a
more neoliberal capitalist economic model.
“Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” has rapidly transformed China into one of
the most economically unequal societies on earth. It now boasts a Gini Coefficient of, officially, around 0.47, worse than the
U.S.’s 0.41. The wealthiest 1% of the population now holds around 31% of the
country’s wealth (not far behind the 35% in the U.S.). But most people in China
remain relatively poor: some 600 million still subsist on a monthly income of
less than 1,000 yuan ($155) a month.
Meanwhile, Chinese tech giants have established monopoly positions even more robust than
their U.S. counterparts, often with market shares nearing 90%. Corporate employment frequently
features an exhausting “996” (9am to
9pm, 6 days a week) schedule. Others labor among struggling legions trapped by
up-front debts in the vast system of modern-day indentured servitude
that is the Chinese “gig economy.”
Up to 400 million Chinese are forecast to enjoy the liberation of such
“self-employment” by 2036, according to Alibaba.
The job market for
China’s ever-expanding pool of
university graduates is so competitive that “graduation equals
unemployment” is a societal meme (the two words share a common Chinese
character). And as young people have flocked to urban metropoles to search for
employment, rural regions have been drained and left to decay, while centuries
of communal extended family life have been upended in a generation, leaving
the elderly to rely on the state for marginal care. In the cities, young
people have been priced out of the property
market by a red-hot asset bubble.
Meanwhile, contrary to
trite Western assumptions of an inherently communal Chinese culture, the sense
of atomization and low
social trust in China has become
so acute that it’s led to periodic bouts of anguished societal soul-searching
after oddly regular instances in which injured individuals have been left to
die on the street by passers-by habitually distrustful of being scammed.
Feeling alone and
unable to get ahead in a ruthlessly consumerist society, Chinese
youth increasingly describe existing in a state of nihilistic
despair encapsulated by the online slang term neijuan (“involution”), which
describes a “turning inward” by individuals and society due to a prevalent
sense of being stuck in a draining rat race where everyone inevitably loses. This despair has manifested itself in a
movement known as tangping,
or “lying flat,” in which people attempt to escape that rat race by doing
the absolute bare minimum amount of work required to live, becoming modern
ascetics.
In this environment, China’s fertility rate has collapsed to
1.3 children per woman as of 2020—below Japan and above only South Korea as the
lowest in the world—plunging its economic future into crisis. Ending family
size limits and government attempts to persuade families to have more children
have been met with incredulity and ridicule by Chinese young people as being
“totally out of touch” with economic and social reality. “Do they not yet
know that most young people are exhausted just supporting themselves?”
asked one typically viral post on social media. It’s true that, given
China’s cut-throat education system, raising even one child costs a huge sum:
estimates range between $30,000 (about seven times the annual salary of the
average citizen) and $115,000, depending on location.
But even those Chinese
youth who could afford to have kids have found they enjoy a new lifestyle: the
coveted DINK (“Double Income, No Kids”)
life, in which well-educated young couples (married or not) spend all
that extra cash on themselves. As one thoroughly liberated 27-year-old man
with a vasectomy once explained to The New York Times: “For our generation, children aren’t a
necessity…Now we can live without any burdens. So why not invest our spiritual
and economic resources on our own lives?”
So while Americans
have today given up the old dream of liberalizing China, they should maybe look
a little closer. It’s true that China
never remotely liberalized—if you consider liberalism to be all about democratic elections, a free
press, and respect for human rights. But many political thinkers would argue
there is more to a comprehensive definition of modern liberalism than that. Instead, they would identify
liberalism’s essential telos as being the
liberation of the individual from all limiting ties of place, tradition,
religion, associations, and relationships, along with all the material limits
of nature, in pursuit of the radical autonomy of the modern “consumer.”
From this perspective,
China has been thoroughly liberalized, and the picture of what’s happening to Chinese society begins to look far more
like Wang’s nightmare of a liberal culture consumed by nihilistic individualism
and commodification.
The Grand Experiment
It is in this context
that Wang Huning appears to have won a long-running debate within the Chinese
system about what’s now required for the People’s Republic of China to endure. The
era of tolerance for unfettered economic and cultural liberalism in China is
over.
According to a leaked account by one of his old friends, Xi has found
himself, like Wang, “repulsed
by the all-encompassing commercialization of Chinese society, with its
attendant nouveaux riches, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and
self-respect, and such ‘moral evils’ as drugs and prostitution.” Wang has now
seemingly convinced Xi that they have no choice but to take drastic action to head off
existential threats to social order being generated by Western-style economic
and cultural liberal-capitalism—threats nearly identical to those that scourge the U.S.
This intervention has
taken the form of the Common Prosperity campaign, with Xi declaring in January that “We absolutely must not
allow the gap between rich and poor to get wider,” and warning that “achieving
common prosperity is not only an economic issue, but also a major political
issue related to the party’s governing foundations.”
This is why
anti-monopoly investigations have hit China’s top technology firms with
billions of dollars in fines and forced restructurings and strict new data
rules have curtailed China’s internet and social media companies. It’s why
record-breaking IPOs have been put on hold and corporations ordered to improve
labor conditions, with “996” overtime requirements made illegal and pay
raised for gig workers. It’s why the government killed off the private tutoring sector
overnight and capped property rental price increases. It’s why the government
has announced “excessively
high incomes” are to be “adjusted.”
And it’s why
celebrities like Zhao Wei have been disappearing, why Chinese minors have been
banned from playing the “spiritual opium” of video games for more than three hours per
week, why LGBT groups have been scrubbed from the internet, and why abortion
restrictions have been significantly tightened. As one nationalist article
promoted across state media explained, if the liberal West’s “tittytainment strategy” is
allowed to succeed in causing China’s “young generation lose their toughness
and virility then we will fall…just
like the Soviet Union did.” The purpose of Xi’s “profound transformation” is
to ensure that “the cultural market will no longer be a
paradise for sissy stars, and news and public opinion will no longer be in a
position of worshipping Western culture.”
In the end, the
campaign represents Wang Huning’s triumph and his terror. It’s thirty years of
his thought on culture made manifest in policy.
On one hand, it is
worth viewing honestly the level of economic, technological, cultural, and
political upheaval the West is currently experiencing and considering whether
he may have accurately diagnosed a common undercurrent spreading through our
globalized world. On the other, the odds that his gambit to engineer new
societal values can succeed seems doubtful, considering the many failures of
history’s other would-be “engineers of the soul.”
The best simple proxy
to measure this effort in coming years is likely to be demographics. For
reasons not entirely clear, many countries around the world now face the
same challenge: fertility rates that have fallen below the replacement rate
as they’ve developed into advanced economies. This has occurred across a
diverse array of political systems, and shows little sign of moderating.
Besides immigration, a wide range of policies have now been tried in attempts
to raise birth rates, from increased public funding of childcare services to
“pro-natal” tax credits for families with children. None have been consistently
successful, sparking anguished debate in some quarters on whether losing the
will to survive and reproduce is simply a fundamental factor of modernity. But
if any country can succeed in reversing this trend, no matter the brute-force
effort required, it is likely to be China.
Either way, our world
is witnessing a grand experiment that’s now underway: China
and the West, facing very similar societal problems, have now, thanks to Wang Huning, embarked on
radically different approaches to addressing them. And with China increasingly
challenging the United States for a position of global geopolitical and
ideological leadership, the conclusion of this experiment could very well shape
the global future of governance for the century ahead.
N.S. Lyons is an analyst and writer living and
working in Washington, D.C. He is the author of The Upheaval.
Thursday, December 23, 2021
Making Green, Disposable Face Masks That Won’t Become Ocean Plastic - Bloomberg
The Quest for a Disposable Mask That Won’t Pollute
Companies experiment with
ways to make the plastic used in most face coverings biodegradable, so it won’t
threaten marine life.
By
K Oanh Ha
+Sign Up for Bloomberg Green
December
22, 2021, 9:00 PM GMT
ILLUSTRATION:
DEREK ABELLA FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
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Since the beginning of the pandemic two years ago, global production
of face masks has rocketed to 129 billion a month from just
an estimated
8 billion in all of 2019. While they’ve helped protect humans
from Covid-19, the masks—which today are mostly made from plastic fibers that
can take hundreds of years to disintegrate—are a threat for creatures that
dwell in streams, rivers, and oceans. Almost 1.6 billion of the face coverings
likely ended up in the seas in 2020, based on a conservative assumption by the
marine conservation nonprofit OceansAsia, which estimates about 3% of masks
made that year ended up as litter. Out in the open, their fibers break up into
microplastics that are impossible to collect far more quickly than plastic
bags, making them a bigger threat than plastic bags, according to a University
of Southern Denmark study.
“Plastic pollution was
already one of the greatest threats to our planet before the coronavirus
outbreak,” United Nations official Pamela Coke-Hamilton said
in a report from the organization’s Conference on Trade and
Development. “The sudden boom in the daily use of certain products to keep
people safe and stop the disease is making things much worse.”
To address that problem, dozens of manufacturers around the
world are working on biodegradable masks. Some are made from new plastics said
to self-destruct in a few months. Others use a plastic substitute made from
corn starch, sugar cane, and other sugars. And a few are even embedded with
seeds that germinate into meadow flowers.
“Biodegradable masks will be a big market with a lot of demand
from governments who are seeing what a big problem mask pollution is becoming,”
says Francois Dalibard, chief executive officer of Groupe Lemoine, a French
company that manufactured 500 million face masks this year. “The first ones to
offer it will have a big advantage.”
U.K. startup Polymateria Ltd. has patented a formula that uses
about a dozen chemicals—rubbers, oils, desiccants—added to plastics during
manufacturing. The mix can be adjusted to create soft plastic fibers used in
masks, thin films for food packaging, or more rigid materials used to make cups
or drink pouches. The products can be customized to self-destruct after a
certain time, with the additives helping turn the plastic into a wax that’s
fully digested by natural bacteria and fungi in about a year.
“The sudden
boom in the daily use of certain products to keep people safe and stop the
disease is making things much worse”
Polymateria worked with BSI, the U.K.’s national standards body,
to create what it says are the industry’s first standards for measuring the
biodegradability of the most littered type of plastic, polyolefins. Plastic
products can be certified as meeting the
standard by laboratories around the world by measuring how much
plastic has been reduced to a harmless wax and testing to make sure no
hazardous substances are left behind.
Although several companies offer certification for biodegradable
plastics, verifying claims that a plastic material is biodegradable is
difficult. “Biodegradation of plastics is a complex process that depends on
both the material itself and the conditions of the environment in which it
takes place,” says Nicole Grobert, chair of the Group
of Chief Scientific Advisors to the European Commission. To assess
whether a polymer is biodegradable, it’s important to develop “coherent
standards for testing and certification, assessing the biodegradation of
plastic products in specific environments. Currently such standards for testing
and certification do not exist.”
That hasn’t stopped companies from trying. Thai petrochemical
company Indorama
Ventures PCL has licensed Polymateria’s technology and is
planning to use it in fibers it’s designing for mask makers. The company says
it’s in discussions with Group Lemoine and mask makers in India and Malaysia to
supply the new biodegradable material for those manufacturers’ face coverings.
“We’ve looked for a long time for a solution like this that doesn’t leave any
microplastics,” says Prashant Desai, Indorama’s fibers chief innovation
officer. The company says it’s testing the biodegradable masks against the
U.K.’s BSI guidelines for biodegradability, and initial tests of the material
have passed the standard.
The Canadian Shield in Waterloo, which manufactures millions of
units of personal protective equipment weekly and contracts with the Canadian
government to supply face shields, is having trouble keeping up with demand for
its BioMask. The
biodegradable mask incorporates an additive that allows for microbes and
enzymes to “eat away at the treated plastic” once in the landfill. The company
says its certified mask, excluding the ear loops and nosebridge, biodegrades
6.5% in 45 days and was tested under conditions similar to a landfill setting.
The masks from Canadian Shield don’t turn into a digestible wax and aren’t
tested for biodegradability in an open-air situation where masks might be
littered.
While disposable medical masks can cost less than 5¢, the
cheapest biodegradable masks run about 30¢ each and are often much more
expensive. The makers of planet-friendly masks say they need higher demand to
help bring down costs. In Hong Kong, mask retailer ReMatter is
selling more than 1 million medical masks monthly and has introduced a
certified biodegradable mask that will decompose completely after five years in
a landfill. At 55¢ each, they’re priced 80% higher than the company’s other
premium masks, which feature Disney characters or stylish colors aimed at
fashionistas. ReMatter, which sells online and at its specialty shops in Hong
Kong, is marketing the coverings to corporations and schoolkids. “We’d like to
bring down the price a bit more so more people are willing to try it,” says
ReMatter founder Alex Lee. “A big part of that is education. We want to make
people aware of their choice and how it affects the environment. We are doing
talks at schools and teaching children why this is important.”
Critics say pitching masks and other plastics as biodegradable
is an irresponsible marketing tactic that could encourage littering. And even
with additives to make them biodegradable, masks can still produce
microplastics if they simply break down into small pieces but stick around,
says David Newman, managing director of the Bio-based and Biodegradable
Industries Association, a U.K. industry lobbying group.
Those concerns haven’t stopped entrepreneurs worldwide from
trying new ideas, including finding solutions for masks that might end up as
litter. A Dutch company called Marie Bee Bloom sells
rice paper masks with hundreds of flower seeds pressed between the layers. If
they end up in a park or a flower pot, the paper soon disintegrates, allowing
the seeds to sprout. Marie Bee Bloom’s staff of 30 has made about 70,000 masks
this year—by hand—which are sold for about €2.6 ($3) each across Europe.
Although the masks don’t have medical certification, that’s in the works, says
Marianne de Groot-Pons, the graphic artist who started the company. “Nobody
wanted to wear masks, they were being littered on the streets, and I wanted to
change the story and message around masks,” she says. “The masks we have to
wear can turn into something beautiful that’s good for the planet.”
Indian startups have also adopted the idea, putting seeds of
tomatoes, okra, and other vegetables into face coverings made from recycled
cloth—though some critics say there’s a risk of seeding invasive species if the
masks hitch a ride on an airplane. De Groot-Pons insists her seeds aren’t
invasive, just ordinary blooms such as poppies, corn flowers, and petunias.
In Vietnam, ShoeX, a footwear manufacturer-turned-mask maker,
sells what it bills as the world’s first face covering made from coffee. The
mask features woven coffee yarn for its outer layer and a biodegradable filter
made with coffee beans and silver nanotechnology. In Florida, Elo Industries
Inc. sells a disposable mask it says is made from bioplastics including corn
and cassava. And in the U.K., the Pure Option website carries masks made from
corn-based plastic and sustainable paper.
“We need masks to be reusable where possible, but many of us
will still use and prefer disposable ones,” says Yeen Seen Ng, founder of think
tank Centre for Research, Advisory and Technology, which advises Southeast
Asian governments on sustainability plans. “We need biodegradable mask
innovation and technologies to tackle the pollution challenge.”
BOTTOM LINE - An estimated 1.6
billion disposable masks ended up in the world’s seas in 2020. So the face
coverings could join plastic bags and bottles as major global waste threats.
