Strolling along a Beijing street, a young couple paused to buy a bag of fried pork dumplings. The stallholder picked up half a dozen in the filmiest of plastic bags, rolled a couple of steamed buns into another and popped the lot into yet another plastic bag.

It would be hard to tell that new nationwide limits on such packaging took effect on Sunday.

China is almost suffocating under plastic bags. Its 1.3 billion people use three billion bags every day. That’s about 1.6 million tonnes of the items each year, and the Government wants to reduce that to 1.1 million tonnes.

Increasingly aware of the rapid and widespread degradation of the environment in China’s headlong race to industrialisation and modernisation, Beijing is trying to reverse the damage.

But for a people who have, in a few brief years, ditched their string bags and have come to rely on the plastic bag whenever they go shopping, a complete ban would be impossible to enforce. Thus the Government has prohibited the ultra-thin bags of 0.025 mm in thickness that are ubiquitous when buying such foods as takeaway dumplings, while requiring shoppers to pay for sturdier ones.

While most Chinese say they welcome the move towards environmental protection, the Government has recognized the challenge involved. Retailers will face a fine of up to 10,000 yuan (£715) for providing shoppers with free bags — down from an initial plan by the Ministry of Commerce for a fine of 30,000 yuan.

Chen Wei, selling steamed buns from a stall in an alley in central Beijing, seemed unconcerned. “I am still using these ultra-thin plastic bags because I have some left. When I have used them all up then I guess I will stop. My customers will have to bring their own bags, or I will charge them two mao for a bag.” That’s no small sum when a steamed bun costs about six mao (0.04p).

Plastic bags have been blamed for filling up landfills, for choking marine life and for suffocating wild animals. One panda in the Beijing Zoo slowly starved and had to be put to sleep after eating food in a plastic bag thrown by a visitor into his pen.

The filmy bags, in orange and blue, are whipped by the wind across even the most remote plateaus of Tibet.

To satisfy demand, China uses 37 million dollars of ever more costly crude oil each year to churn out the bags.

French supermarket giant Carrefour has ordered cloth bags that it will sell for 4.9 yuan each. Wal-Mart China is to sell cloth bags from 1.9 yuan to 9.9 yuan each — depending on size and thickness.

In a Beijing department store, Zhang Lihua was selling cosmetics. “Sorry,” she told a shopper. “I can’t give you a plastic bag. It’s illegal from today.”

Sze Pang Cheung, communications director for Greenpeace China, wondered about the ability to enforce the rules beyond major cities. “China has had a poor record of enforcing its environmental law in the past — laws about pollution, the environmental impact assessment in factories. Many of the pieces of legislation are well-drafted, but the problem is enforcement.” China’s ambition is to join a small number of countries — from Ireland to Bangladesh — that are already implementing similar rules.

Said one man in a cake shop: “Is there a ban on plastic bags? I didn’t know that. Anyway, maybe it’ll take effect next month. No one is going to enforce it today.

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