Hong Kong stores will charge for plastic bags

More than 20 young cyclists rode through the busy streets of Kowloon Wednesday to ask shops to participate in Hong Kong's first No Plastic Bag Day on April 15. Members of environmental organization Green Student Council were joined by other cyclists for the morning ride from Tsim Sha Tsui's landmark Clock Tower to Mong Kok and back. Along the way they played a recorded message on a speaker to promote No Plastic Bag Day, and invited shop owners to join. Shops participating will not offer free plastic bags to customers for the day. Instead, shoppers will have to pay 50 cents for each bag. Proceeds from the event will go to Oxfam Hong Kong. Green Student Council chairman Angus Ho said the event addressed concern over massive overuse of plastic bags in the city. Hong Kong consumes 33 million plastic bags - 5 per resident - every day. Australia, with 20 million people, uses a quarter of that number of bags a day, and Ireland, which introduced a bag levy in 2002, uses a third. By Wednesday, 1,200 supermarkets and retail chains had agreed to join the day, including leading supermarkets ParknShop, Wellcome, China Resources Vanguard (Hong Kong), Maxim's Cake shop and Sa Sa. Ho said that the number is very encouraging. No Plastic Bags Day will also serve as a pilot scheme for the government, the public, businesses and nongovernment organizations to work together to reduce the use of plastic bags, Ho said. He believed it was important to let the public experience having to pay for plastic bags. "People can experience having to pay for the waste they produce, before the government implements a plastic bag tax," Ho said. Housewife Yeung Siu-fun, 50, who bring her own bags when going shopping, supports the event. "It can help reduce bag use as people will find it is often unnecessary for them to use bags," she said. Tsuen Wan convenience store worker Mary Pang said her colleagues also want to promote a reduction in plastic bag use and they are going to propose placing placards bearing the message next to the cashier and newspaper racks. "Not to put newspapers in a plastic bag can not only help our company cut costs, but reduce our workload too," Pang said. I wish that instead of charging 50 cents on just that one day, they’d charge a token 5 cents every day (in Hong Kong 5 cents won’t even buy you peanuts, its that small an amount). Just the fact of paying even a nominal token amount reminds people of the harm that plastic bags do. Avoiding the use of plastic bags is easy and economical (see http://www.badlani.com/bags) but as long as plastic bags are given away free, people are going to use them.