As this year's Mid-Autumn Festival approaches, the All-China Environment Federation (ACEF) on Wednesday launched a campaign to persuade the public to refuse moon cakes that are packaged too luxuriously.

The proposal urges food factories to produce and customers to buy simply-packaged moon cakes. The Mid-Autumn Festival falls on October 6 this year.

The State Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine issued a clear national standard for moon cake packaging last year, saying that the box should be no more than 9,000 cu.cm for one kilogram of moon cake and the cost of a moon cake box should not exceed 25 percent of the total cost of the product.

This weekend, the ACEF's 500 volunteers will go to Beijing's major shopping malls and supermarkets to hand out the proposals to customers and see whether moon cakes on the shelves are in line with national packaging standards.

In recent years moon cakes, a traditional symbol of family love, have been accused of wasting resources and even becoming a tool for corruption.

China's most expensive box of moon cakes appeared in Kunming, capital city of southwest China's Yunnan Province, in 2004, with a shockingly high price tag of 310,000 yuan. Some moon cakes come complete with digital cameras, Uliang liquor, Parker pens, even a house with a floor space of over 100 square meters.

(Xinhua News Agency September 14, 2006)