Econ & Business – Page 26 – Mutantfrog Travelogue

Surprise! you are now a part of the “Metabolic Syndrome Market”

Thomas Jefferson famously said, “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” As cliche as it’s become, the quote still rings very true to me as an avid newspaper and online news consumer.

Even today, it is very easy for those following the news to get caught up in the story of the day and completely miss the big picture. Part of the reason for this is that a news story is quite often the end result of months and months of researching, campaigning, planning, cost-benefit analyzing, focus grouping, intra-group wrangling, or any combination of the above. Therefore, when the average reader sees an announcement, whether it’s for a new hamburger at Wendy’s or the Barack Obama Speech About Race, we are forced to accept the basic premise and set of facts presented, and prevented by our own ignorance as outsiders, and the immediacy of reading information on the Internet, from seeing different parts of the story. The only possible response from the consumer is a sort of tit-for-tat reaction to the new information.

With that in mind, I want to talk about “Metabolic syndrome,” a set of symptoms, including overweight and high blood pressure, that puts one at risk of “lifestyle diseases” such as diabetes. In many cases it is indistinguishable from obesity (and in modern Japanese the terms are used somewhat interchangeably), but it is apparently useful as a medical definition.

The term became especially popular in Japan in 2007, as popular TV shows, infomercials, newspapers, and even the government played up the disease as a growing danger for Japanese people as they live increasingly sedentary lifestyles and consume ever-greater quantities of greasy Western snacks.

The English-language news media has noticed this phenomenon. The Japan Times, a local Japanese English-language newspaper aimed at the expat population, notes:

These days, not a single day goes by, it seems, without there being a fitness-club flier, a beverage ad or a new recipe that contains some mention of metabo, short for “metabolic syndrome.”

In contrast to the massive hype over the increasing problem of metabolic syndrome, the introduction of “specified medical examinations” at the beginning of this month has received much less fanfare. Under this system, all insured persons aged 40-74 will be required to undergo a yearly health check up, followed up by mandatory “guidance” if they are diagnosed with certain conditions. Metabolic syndrome is perhaps the most controversial, as people diagnosed with the condition may have to go through “active guidance” if they are particularly fat.

Coinciding with the introduction of this program is a series of article in the Nikkei Shimbun by a major corporate research group (I think Nomura) titled “the Emerging Metabolic Syndrome Market.” The series is ongoing, but some of its main points can be summed up as follows:

1) The specified examination system will result in thousands, if not millions, of people being officially diagnosed with “metabolic” syndrome.
2) The current medical establishment does not have the capacity to handle all these new “patients” so the mandatory follow-up care will be left in the hands of outsourcers.
3) The program, part of a Koizumi-era medical reform plan (also featuring increased premiums and patient contributions), is intended to make people healthier, which will reduce Japan’s total medical bill. However, actual cost savings will probably take at least 25 years to emerge, and in the short term the government will be dishing out massive largess to whoever can fill this current legally-mandated demand.

The Japan Development Bank has estimated that this metabolic syndrome market will grow to 280 billion yen, a “chance for medical institutions facing harsh business conditions [due to a drop in government payments in the national insurance scheme] to improve their revenue.” 45% of the 9.45 million targets of the system are expected to be judged as metabolic cases or in danger of becoming so, resulting in extra medical expenditures of 73-141 billion yen per year.

This specified exam system has been in the planning stages for years. In the meantime, the media has fanned popular worry over an obesity epidemic, couched in the convenient, one-word slogan “metabo.” And now doctors, or their counterparts in third-party examination centers, have the correct mindset and the legal authority to start diagnosing the problem and mandating treatment. The media, over the past two years or so, has featured the problem of metabolic syndrome in perhaps dozens of creative segments, ranging from features on anti-metabolic syndrome products, to informative explanations of the waist size/internal organ fat conditions for the diagnosis, to wackier efforts by Health Ministry officials to document their efforts to lose weight.

While the term metabolic syndrome is not new and is not a Japanese invention, the intense media campaign has injected the word “metabo” as synonymous with obesity in the Japanese language, with the added twist of hipness (new, trendy words are always a topic of small talk in Japan) and the specificity that comes with “metabolic syndrome” being the name of an actual disease rather than a mere physical attribute.

Without this propaganda campaign and the re-definition of the word obesity, it is unlikely that a vibrant market for anti-metabolic syndrome products would develop as effectively. But taken together, public awareness of the issue is so high that a diagnosis of metabolic syndrome will make much more sense to people and may make them more receptive to attempts to influence their behavior in a healthier direction.

I see two ways to view this major awareness campaign to alert everyday Japanese to the dangers of obesity – either Japan’s medical establishment has come up with an ingenious method for preventive care that will ensure that the life expectancy for Japanese people extends well into the 90s, or government, industry, and the media are conspiring once again to manufacture demand to solve a non-existent problem.

True, it seems like there is a real obesity problem here and a comprehensive plan focused on preventive care (i.e., fighting unhealthy habits will help prevent more serious ailments such as diabetes and heart disease) is a great idea. On the other hand, a massive, mandatory treatment program might be overdoing it, especially if it is taxpayer funded. The system does sound like it might be effective in addressing a real problem, to the extent that it encourages healthy behavior, and could lead to better quality of life for a lot of people. And as with the intention of many Koizumi-era reforms, the creation of new markets through smart regulation may be just what Japan needs to enliven its economy and, through the health benefits, help keep its working population on the job for the extra years that will be required in an aging society.

But my more cynical side tells me that the medical industry may not have Japan’s best interests at heart. If in fact, the expenses are not justified (and hundreds of millions of dollars in extra health burden with no promised overall benefits for a generation seems a little fishy to me) then the government could merely be entrapping its people into a handout scheme for the medical and health product industries.

Only 3% of Japan’s population is considered obese by body mass index standards, compared to ten times that ratio in the US. The figure has risen significantly for Japan over the past few decades, no doubt a result of the often mentioned higher living standards and Westernized diets. But as any prolonged contact with Japanese people will tell you, the demand for health supplements, beauty products, spa treatments, exercise machines, and all manner of health-related products is enormous. I wouldn’t be surprised if the market scale rivaled the US.

However, metabolic syndrome is a substantial redefinition of obesity (not that that is necessarily a bad thing — it seems to correspond much more closely to health problems than BMI, at least from a comparison of Wikipedia articles). Even if people are not fat in the traditional sense, they are much more likely to have the required body measurements for metabolic syndrome. And sure enough, media fanfare over this syndrome dovetails nicely with the ever-growing numbers of products offered to help fight it. And as any quick look at the Japanese mass media will tell you, there is no shortage of such products (today on NHK I saw a full-on infomercial for boxer briefs that force men to take larger strides when they walk, which will help them burn more calories during the day).

From my own observation of the Japanese user-generated media (which consists of a few favored blogs, a 2ch news aggregator, and the diary posting of my mixi friends), the reaction to the metabolic syndrome hype has been quite shallow, with perhaps zero discussion of this upcoming mandatory treatment system (until now, since it came into effect). Indeed, according to a survey translated at What Japan Thinks, almost two thirds of people are unaware that the specified examination system even exists. That, I think, is understandable since the coverage of this issue has tended to be in the form of corporate press releases quoted verbatim, statistics from medical establishment publications on the growing problem.

Honestly, I am no medical expert, and I do not intend to attempt a comprehensive assessment of the relative benefits of mandatory health exams for the middle aged, or of the real dangers of metabolic syndrome. But personally, I have been disappointed in myself for not giving this issue much thought until I ran across that series of articles in the Nikkei. Like many people, probably 75% of the reading I do in a given day consists of news articles, the paper newspaper, and blog posts. They are all quite entertaining to read and keep me informed of what’s going on in the world on a day to day basis, but the net effect of reading superficial day to day coverage is that I end up being completely in the dark about what sort of plans are being hatched behind the scenes.

The Japanese press has asked some of the right questions, and for someone more engaged the information is out there. A Yomiuri Shimbun report from last year cites experts who wonder why the waist size requirements are slimmer than those of other countries (a detail that can have massive implications on how many are singled out for mandatory “guidance” and whether that will affect people who are actually healthy), but in the end the hype has drowned out skepticism and a “metabolic syndrome market” is already fast being built without the knowledge of the vast majority of people. Residents of Japan may be getting fleeced in the deal in terms of increased insurance costs and dubious products intended to solve a problem that for many won’t really exist.

Hong Kong taxis and their Japan connection

During my New Year’s trip to Hong Kong, I managed to ride in a taxi only once. I was at Hong Kong International Airport and I needed to get to Mui Wo on the other side of the island of Lantau, where I was spending the night. This required a fairly expensive ride up and down a giant mountain in the middle of the island, but fortunately I got to split the fare with a friendly Cathay Pacific pilot who didn’t want to wait for the next elusive blue taxi.

You see, in Hong Kong, there are three kinds of taxis. In central Hong Kong and Kowloon, the most developed parts, you mostly see “red taxis” which are licensed to serve the urban center. In the New Territories to the north, you see “green taxis” which are limited to the New Territories. Lantau likewise has its own fleet of “blue taxis.” If you are traveling solely on Lantau, your only option is the blue taxi: a red or green taxi is not allowed to carry you. Which is a shame because there are a LOT of red taxis at the airport.

I ended up calling a dispatcher (after waiting for a few minutes to see if a blue taxi would show up at random). Ten minutes later, a blue taxi showed up, and the pilot and I began a long trek across Lantau.

Most of the island is undeveloped mountains and hills, and the road crossing through the middle is in a never-ending process of being widened to two lanes. I learned from my traveling companion that driving is tightly restricted on Lantau, and even if you have a car there (which requires a special permit) you can’t drive it around during the day–only at night. The poor throughput on the mountain road was enough to convince me that said policy was justified. If you need a vehicle for personal or business use, there are used cars in el cajon that may fit your needs.

Our journey gave me plenty of time to notice something odd about the cab. It used to be Japanese, and in fact it still had a few Japanese stickers in the window, including a peeling and somewhat outdated fare quote in yen.

It turns out that, at least according to Wikipedia, “almost all taxis in Hong Kong are Toyota Comfort“–the same model as the boxy taxis and police cars found all over Japan. After spotting this example, I spent quite some time getting intensely interested in Hong Kong taxis, and I noticed that this was not a one-off: many other Hong Kong taxis carry Japanese markings here and there. In some taxi windows, I could see spots where the stickers had been removed.

What led to this practice? I can’t say for sure, although I can give some plausible reasons.

One is that cars lose value pretty quickly in Japan because of stringent roadworthiness testing (“shaken“) requirements which make older cars prohibitively expensive to keep. As a result, exporting is a big business: a person who doesn’t want to pay for the inspection is often happy to sell their car to an exporter for a bargain price. Then the exporter can ship it to Australia, Russia, Hong Kong or elsewhere, sell it to a local and collect a tidy profit.
Hong Kong is also the closest left-hand drive territory to Japan, which makes it a natural market for used Japanese cars: they fit right in, much moreso than they would in Korea, Taiwan or mainland China (where people drive on the right).
Hong Kong shares the crowdedness and hilly terrain which Japanese taxis are (I assume) well designed to handle.

I’m sure there’s some funky tax or regulatory reason for this as well, which some friendly commenter will point out.

Anyway, Mui Wo, my final destination, was an odd corner of civilization, and it served to show me that even Hong Kong, the most modern and developed part of China, still has its little pockets of Third Worldliness.

The “Rosebud” moment

Now that Fidel Castro is finally resigning, just think of all the decades of trouble that could have avoided if President Roosevelt had just sent him that ten dollars he wanted back in 1940.

President of the United States.
If you like, give me a ten dollar bill green american, in the letter, because never I have not seen a ten dollar bill green american and I would like to have one of them.

My address is:
Sr. Fidel Castro
Colegio de Bolover
Santiago de Cuba
Oriente, Cuba

I don’t know very English but I know very much Spanish and I suppose you don’t know very Spanish but you know very English because you are American but I am not American.

Thank you very much, Good by. Your friend, Fidel Castro

If you want iron to make your ships I will show you the bigest mines of iron of the land. They are in Mayori, Oriente Cuba.

The actual letter is preserved in the US National Archives.

Fun economic indicator: Women’s hair styles

Following up my post on the stock market’s effects on Sazae-san viewership, I wanted to show you something fun I saw in the Nikkei:

Friday, February 15, 2008
Women’s Locks Hold Key To Forecasting Economic Outlook

TOKYO (Nikkei)–Women tend to wear their hair long when the nation’s economy is up and short when it is down, a survey conducted over the past two decades by consumer goods manufacturer Kao Corp. shows. As concern grows about a possible economic downturn, will this hairstyle trend repeat itself, or will something new happen?

Kao has been regularly surveying the hairstyles of 1,000 women on the streets of Tokyo’s Ginza and Osaka’s Umeda districts since 1987. In 1991, the firm defined “short” hair as above the chin, “medium” as above the collarbone, “semi-long” as above the armpit and “long” as below the armpit.

Taking the “short” and “medium” categories together as “short” and the “semi-long” and “long” categories as “long,” the long-short ratio for women in their 20s turned in favor of “short” in Ginza for the first time in 1997. The diffusion index of coincident economic indicators, published by the Economic Planning Agency (now the Cabinet Office), reached zero in November and December of that year, the first two-month streak of that kind in five and a half years. The economy is thought to be deteriorating when the index drops below 50%. That year also saw a boost in the consumption tax and a series of major bankruptcies, including that of Yamaichi Securities Co., and in 1998 the economy contracted.

Until 1990, over 60% of women in their 20s kept their hair long. But since 1997, the percentage of women wearing long hair has remained under 10%. That figure has been rising again lately, but without the briskness that would signal a return to past levels.
…
How has the length of women’s hair, assuming a linkage with the health of the economy, influenced related businesses? The market for hairstyling products, such as hairsprays and gels, are estimated to have peaked in 1994 at 102.5 billion yen in terms of shipments. Then it showed year-on-year decreases for a while, along with falling per capita spending on styling products. Although about 80% of women continued to use those products, they used them less frequently, switching sometimes to products like waxes for the tips of the hair. The market hit bottom in 2004 at 59 billion yen, ending a “lost decade” for hairstyling products.

Though the longest economic expansion since the end of World War II has continued, the consumer confidence index fell for 10 months running to hit a record low for six years and one month in January, according to the Cabinet Office’s Economy Watchers survey released on Feb. 8. With many observers talking about a downturn, Kao’s data suggest that women’s hair will likely get shorter again.

“Women’s hair may get shorter, but shorter hairstyles will not dominate,” said Kotaro Nuriya, brand manager at Kao’s Premium Hair Care/Hair Make Group. He bases his view on the fact that a growing number of women are pulling their hair together in the back or up, as in the chignon style. Kao began including the chignon in its survey in November 2002, and its use has risen 10% to about 30% among women in their 20s recently.

While it might not be surprising to see that women are forced to make choices on which cosmetics to use when they are low on disposable income, it’s funny how predictable this survey makes it seem. Also, this so-called boom time has still been one of low economic growth and has occurred at a time when wages remained stagnant for Japanese overall and growing economic disparity has been an overarching theme, especially in the past two years. With prices rising now during a period of economic slowdown, I’ll have to be on the watch for more faux-expensive hairstyles. They will go great with the cheap clothes/expensive bag look that’s so popular these days.

PS: I wonder if the beehive was the product of a booming economy?

More on plastic bags

Following up on my post about three weeks ago on the movement to curb plastic bag use, the NYT has an article focusing on the success of the Irish campaign.

In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts.

Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent. Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable — on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog.

I think that imposing such fees, essentially a pollution tax being paid in direct response to the pollution itself, may be effective as a means to use market forces for environmental protection. While some libertarian hardliners claim that the only market which matters is the so-called “free market,” operating with no governmental interference whatsoever, in a completely unregulated market the costs of pollution and environmental damage are simply externalized, and born far away from either the producer or consumer of the offending product. By raising the cost of a polluting product, such as a plastic bag, consumers are not just made intellectually aware of the abstract cost which consumption of such a product imposes on the system as a whole, but are forced to make a choice whether or not they, as the responsible party, actually wish to pay the real cost.

Could this be a model for the larger market? It is essentially the same philosophy behind the proposed carbon emissions tax, in which industrial emitters of carbon dioxide are charged fees to encourage thrift and conservation, to reduce the production of greenhouse gases.

On a side note, the article said two more things of which I was not aware. First:

Whole Foods Market announced in January that its stores would no longer offer disposable plastic bags, using recycled paper or cloth instead, and many chains are starting to charge customers for plastic bags.

A positive development from a major US supermarket, and one whose up-scale yuppie customer base will doubtless embrace. Unfortunately, there is still no sign of a nationwide -or even statewide effort, but perhaps competitor supermarkets will be spurred by Whole Foods.

And on a related, yet surprising note:

While paper bags, which degrade, are in some ways better for the environment, studies suggest that more greenhouse gases are released in their manufacture and transportation than in the production of plastic bags.

Rather unfortunate news, I would say. I hope that recycled paper bags, such as the ones which Whole Foods uses, are in fact less polluting. Still, even if paper bags may pollute the air slightly more than plastic, they certainly don’t have as much impact on the sea.

Word of the year- part 3

After a long post a few weeks ago on candidates for word of the year 2007, I’ve just noticed an important addition. The American Dialect Society announced about three weeks ago that “subprime” was voted word of the year bu their members.

Subprime is an adjective used to describe a risky or less than ideal loan, mortgage, or investment. Subprime was also winner of a brand-new 2007 category for real estate words, a category which reflects the preoccupation of the press and public for the past year with a deepening mortgage crisis.

After seeing all the headlines about stock market crash and recession, I’m well convinced that “subprime” is a solid choice. We’ll be hearing a lot more of this word in the months to come.

The Oxford University Press USA blog has a post responding to this announcement, with some valuable information on the history of the word.

In its earliest attested usage, subprime simply meant “substandard” or “below top quality” in a very general sense. A 1960 article in Operational Research Quarterly referred to “sub-prime material” that can cause delays in automatic data-recording equipment. And in 1970, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Armco steel company was introducing a “subprime” line of cold-rolled sheet metal, “intended for users that don’t need surface qualities 100% free of defects, principally for use in unexposed parts, including the back of a refrigerator.” Over time, this sense of subprime was extended in all sorts of directions, such as this Toronto Star critique of a cinematic performance by Madonna in 1993: “her ‘work’ in Body Of Evidence is sub-prime.”

In the mid-1970s, subprime began to be used in the banking sector, but in a context that is just about the opposite of current usage. Rather than relating to the risky credit status of a borrower, subprime originally described a “below prime” lending rate — in other words, below the prime rate that banks and other lending institutions offer to qualified customers. So in this sense, a loan with a subprime rate is a good thing for the borrower, who is allowed to pay an interest rate lower than what is typically offered. That explains this quote from an August 1975 Associated Press article: “Isn’t the prime supposed to go only to the most credit-worthy customers? Why, therefore, they might ask, was subprime offered to a municipality whose credit standing is suspect?” Similarly, a March 1978 article in Institutional Investor told of banks “offering sub-prime rates to lure back customers.”

It wasn’t until the mid-’90s that the currently popular sense of subprime became widespread. Now it was the borrowers themselves who were being classified as “less than prime” based on their credit histories. Customers in this high-risk category were increasingly able to borrow money from established lenders, particularly to pay for mortgages, automobile loans, and the like. Whereas the older sense of subprime implied a loan with a low interest rate, the subprime loans of the ’90s and ’00s have rates much higher than standard. An April 1995 article in Retail Banker International described auto-lending companies offering “loans of new and late-model cars to consumers with imperfect (’sub-prime’) credit histories.” And a February 1997 New York Times article heralded the coming crisis: “A Risky Business Gets Even Riskier: Big Losses and Bad Accounting Leave ‘Subprime’ Lenders Reeling.”

The two competing senses of subprime, referring either to favorable low-interest loans or to unfavorable high-interest ones, would seem to be in direct opposition. You might even call it a “Janus-faced word” or “contronym,” i.e., a word that serves as its own antonym, like cleave or sanction. But the surrounding context should be enough to establish whether it’s the lending rate or the borrower that is considered subprime. Consider another sub- word, subpar. For a golfer, a subpar score is a good thing, but in its more general sense subpar typically characterizes an inferior performance. Only context can resolve the conflict.

As the word subprime becomes more widely known, we can expect many new extensions of meaning. A recent MSNBC report on business buzzwords claims that the word is already in use as a verb “loosely defined as the ability to completely dig one’s self into a hole and then expect a bailout,” as in “I completely subprimed my Algebra test yesterday.” As far as I can tell, that kind of usage is a figment of the reporter’s fertile imagination, since even Urbandictionary, that student favorite, is thus far unaware of subprime as a generic verb. (When the word does show up as a verb, it tends to be in punning formations like “subpriming the pump” or as an ad-hoc reflexive: a columnist for the Aspen Times wrote that “homeowners have subprimed themselves into an economic disaster.”) But let’s hope that the subprime crisis subsides before it spawns too many new additions to our vocabulary. Even if it’s enriching to the lexicon, it’s hardly enriching to the economy.

When you consider that this is the kind of historical, etymological and contextual usage information that goes into almost every entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, I think you’ll see why I consider it unambiguously the best dictionary in the world.

I still think they taste like cardboard

Everyone reading this is familiar with the tasteless paper-filled, paper-textured fortune cookie right? Long thought to have originated as a gimmick desert in one of California’s Chinatowns sometimes in the late 19th or early 20th century, new research strongly suggests that, despite being popularized by the Chinese, fortune cookies were actually invented by Japanese immigrants, who had gotten their inspiration from snacks sold at a Kyoto bakery. The New York Times has an excellent article detailing the whole story, which I must say I find surprisingly convincing. I think anyone else familiar with the wide range of tasteless Japanese traditional snacks (八ッ橋 anyone ? ), the Japanese love for fortunes, and of the tasteless fortune-filled “fortune cookies” distributed inevitably in American Chinese restaurants will also, upon reflection, find the resemblance highly suggestive.

One foreigner’s perspective on American and Japanese immigration security procedures

Jade OC, a long time reader and commenter of MFT, has graciously posted a detailed comparison of his experiences passing through both US and Japanese airline security and immigration checkpoints as a comment on an earlier blog post on the subject. As I suspect that many of our readers look only at the actual posts and not the comments, I thought I would promote this one to the front page.

As promised, here is my short report on the fingerprinting-immigration process in the US and Japan from the POV of a non-citizen of either (though a resident of Japan).

First big complaint. I never wanted to go to the US at all, at least not the first time. But you cannot bloody transit in the US – there’s no such thing as a transit lounge. Everyone who enters a US airport from outside the country, even if, like me, you are just taking a flight to Canada in about 90 minutes, needs to go through Immigration and Customs. This is seriously Fucked Up.

Continue reading One foreigner’s perspective on American and Japanese immigration security procedures

Fun Fact – Sazae-san is a better indicator of Japanese stock performance than the US

In my new job I deal a lot with the stock market. Here is one fun fact I learned at work:

Sazae-san is a better indicator of Japanese stock performance than the US

Sazae-san (episodic story of a quirky but happy Japanese family, sort of like the Simpsons but more like Leave it to Beaver in the execution) has been the top-rated animated TV show in Japan for almost 40 years. A Daiwa Institute of Research study showed that there is a 0.86 correlation coefficient between Sazae-san viewership and TOPIX movements. This is even higher than the correlation between TOPIX and the NYSE composite index, even though the US markets are supposed to be one of the main drivers of Tokyo trading.

The explanation for this phenomenon is that people tend to go out on Sundays when the stock market is booming and people have money to spend and stay home to watch Sazae-san when it’s slumping and everyone is broke. Platforms like Spreadex, which offer trading and financial services, might analyze such trends to better understand market behavior as noted in the Spreadex Review.

Now, just because there is a correlation, that doesn’t mean that you should break into Video Research (the Japanese ratings house) on Sunday night to plan your Monday morning trades. At any rate, if you want to read this theory in detail it is available in paperback.

Plastic bags of doom

It looks like fresh attention is being paid to the fact that plastic bags are among the most troublesome and pernicious forms of waste. How bad? Well, “continents of floating garbage” for a start. Think that’s an exaggeration? Well, “One plastic patch is estimated to weigh over 3 million tons and covers an area twice the size of Texas.” And how much ecological damage does it do?

The United Nations Environment Program says plastic is accountable for the deaths of more than a million seabirds and more than 100,000 marine mammals such as whales, dolphins and seals every year.

That almost certainly dwarfs any damage to cetacean populations that could be caused by, to take a far more famous issue, Japan’s “scientific” whaling program. Not to mention the yet-unknown effects that all of this plastic is likely having on fish, algae, plankton, etc. Could the collapsing fishing stocks be attributable not just to the direct action of over-fishing, but also to poisoning and choking by gargantuan amounts of plastic?

Since the plastic tends to gather in isolated and rarely trafficked patches of sea, so deep into international waters that no country even crosses path with it, much less has responsibility for it. As yet, there is no world body with either the political motivation, technology, or infrastructure necessary for embarking on what would easily be the largest cleanup project in history, and it is difficult to imagine any realistic way that such a huge mass could be removed.

Still, as hopeless as the cleanup is, at least the world is beginning to work to phase out the manufacture and use of such plastic bag, which will at least slow down the rate at which the problem worsens. An announcement earlier today that China-the world’s largest and most polluting nation-will be drastically cutting plastic bag usage is an important step.

As in most countries that have attempted to tackle the problems causes by plastic bag waste, China will primarily be relying not on a total ban on their use, but a requirement that stores no longer give them out free with purchases, but charge extra for them. It is hoped that imposing a surcharge on the bags will encourage customers to bring their own environmentally friendly reusable bags when they go shopping, as has been the case in other countries.

While, as far as I know, Bangladesh is the only country which has as yet completely banned the distribution of plastic bags, a number of countries have imposed bag surcharges similar to the one proposed for China. Taiwan introduced a charge equivalent to something like 5-7 US cents per bag, Singapore has a similar system, and Ireland-an island about twice the size of Taiwan, and formerly a consumer of over 1.2 BILLION plastic bags per year-has imposed a 15 cents/bag fee that is credited with reducing their use by 90%. Other countries in Europe, most likely starting with Ireland’s next-door neighbor of Britain, will likely follow.

Some other countries, such as Japan, have been relying on voluntary conservation to combat plastic bag proliferation. Although some Japanese supermarkets have taken the bold step of simply not having bags at all, they are still given away for free in most businesses. However, convenience stores recently began offering a discount of several yen to customers who refuse a plastic bag. Although the clerk is officially supposed to ask customers if they need a bag, in my experience they almost never do, and simply give them out habitually.

Although I have yet to hear a serious proposal to either ban or charge for plastic bags in the heavy consuming United States, I have recently noticed two well-meant but minor initiatives. The first was at the New York University campus bookstore and computer stores, where if you refuse a plastic bag they give you a token you throw into one of four or five bins near the exit, each one representing a charity. Each token pledges a 5 cents donation to that charity. The other was a sign at my local A&P Supermarket, promising a discount of a few cents for customers who bring their own bags. Unfortunately, this will certainly prove as ineffectual as the convenience store initiative in Japan, particularly since I only saw the sign by the exit, in an area not even visible from the cash register/bagging area.

Will these various measures have a major effect on the plastic bag problem? The answer to that thankfully seems to be a yes-but a qualified yes. It is still to early to know how much ecological damage the vast amounts of plastic already in the ocean have caused, or will cause in the future. And despite movement towards curbing the future growth of the “continents of floating garbage,” we may never be able to get rid of them.

For more information on the oceanic plastics quandary, have a look at this short documentary, filmed on location in the Pacific Ocean.