The key to the radical cure of pesticide "small package and big pollution" lies in scale.

China is a big country in the production and use of pesticides, pesticide packaging is mainly small-scale packaging. It is estimated that as many as 10 billion pesticide packaging materials are needed every year, and more than 3 billion pesticide packaging wastes are discarded at will. These non-degradable small packages and pesticide residues cause "great pollution" of soil and water, affecting the quality of agricultural products and human health.

This year, the Ministry of Environmental Protection issued the measures for the Management of Recycling and disposal of Pesticide Packaging wastes (for trial implementation), requiring pesticide production enterprises as the main body to be responsible for the recycling and disposal of packaging wastes. But in fact, the level of farmers' participation largely determines the success of pesticide waste packaging recycling. Without the participation of farmers, the cost of collecting waste packaging scattered in the fields will be huge.

Therefore, it is very important to help farmers develop the habit of recycling pesticide waste packaging and enhance their awareness of environmental protection. In the initial stage, simple publicity and education is not very effective, and it is necessary to find the right interest-driven entry point, such as DuPont's "10 waste packages for a Kangkuan product of the same packaging specification" and Haoyang's 15 cents to recycle a waste pesticide bottle. This way of giving certain material incentives to farmers has not only aroused the enthusiasm of farmers, but also enhanced their awareness of environmental protection, and achieved good results.

However, this approach also has shortcomings: first, to increase the burden on enterprises, some small and medium-sized enterprises may be overwhelmed. Second, once the material reward weakens or is not enough to arouse the enthusiasm of farmers, the phenomenon of randomly discarding pesticide waste packaging may rebound.

In fact, the root of the problem of random disposal of pesticide waste packaging lies in the small-scale decentralized operation of agricultural production in our country at present. Pesticide enterprises are mostly small packaging in order to meet the needs of farmers' small-scale production. Most of these small packages are plastic products, which are difficult to degrade, difficult to recover, and difficult to reuse even after recycling.

Therefore, the fundamental solution to the recycling of pesticide waste packaging lies in the appropriate scale operation of agricultural production. In this way, the pesticide application work can be undertaken by the unified control social service organization to carry out large-scale operations, and accordingly the pesticide packaging will be turned into a large-scale package. Changing from small packaging to large packaging not only facilitates recycling, but also reduces the recovery cost of enterprises, which is also a means to reduce waste packaging.

However, at present, when China has not yet entered the "big family era", only relying on one or two enterprises to recycle waste packaging spontaneously, its scope of capacity is limited. The waste packaging of pesticides is different from ordinary garbage and needs to be disposed of by a special recycling system. This requires farmers, dealers and pesticide enterprises to form a joint force, and the government should do a good job in the formulation of laws and standards, the construction of centralized hazardous waste disposal centers and other basic work. Places with sufficient financial resources should also explore the establishment of a financial investment mechanism for the recycling of pesticide waste packaging, so as to pry more social capital to participate in this work.