LookAtVietnam – Up to 10,000 households in Ha Noi will be supplied with environmentally-friendly shopping bags for shopping in a pilot effort to reduce the use of plastic bags.

The next phase of the green shopping bag project will be in HCM City.

“Plastic bags are increasingly manufactured and used with alarmingly frequency in Viet Nam, despite the fact that they cause adverse effects to human health, the environment and accelerate climate change,” said chairman of the centre Nguyen Thanh Luu.

“The Centre has begun an ambitious initiative to gradually reduce and then eliminate plastic bags from daily life; the first step focuses on reducing plastic bags in retail activities.”

Cooperating supermarkets in the capital area will register households and distribute the bags. These include Hapro, Fivimart, Bai Tho Rosa, Ha Noi Star and Van Ho Trading Centre.

Each bag has a bar code, and shops and supermarkets participating in the project scan the code on the bag whenever customers use it. Every month or every quarter, the supermarkets will estimate how much money has been saved by customers using the reusable bags. Based on the estimated cost-saving from lower plastic bag usage, the stores will turn by 50 per cent of those savings back over to the consumers in the form of discounts, gifts or cash.

The SCC estimates that Hanoians use in total $38 million worth of plastic bags each year. Providing cloth bags for all 800,000 Hanoi families would require a budget of VND135 billion (US$8 million), but if everyone used them, it is estimated that $28 million can be saved per year on plastic bags, and the environment will be kept cleaner.

To store wet cookings such as meats and fish, the project advises customers to use specialised wet-food bags made of safe-for-health plastic materials that can be re-used for about six months. (The project is not providing these bags.)

Luu said the SCC project aims to reduce plastic bags used by 100,000 bags per day in Ha Noi by the end of 2009. The next phases of the project include expansion to other cities such as HCM City, Da Nang and Hai Phong with the target of reducing consumption by1,000,000 plastic bags per day by the end of 2011.

VietNamNet/Viet Nam News