LookAtVietnam – As many as 10,000 households in Ha Noi will be supplied with sets of environmentally-friendly bags for shopping in an effort to dramatically 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 put forward 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.”

The project management board found companies and supermarkets in the capital willing to register households and distribute the bags. Participating supermarkets 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, depending on each supermarket, the supermarkets will estimate how much money has been saved by customers using the new 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 spend VND648 billion (US$38 million) a year on plastic bags. Providing cloth bags for all 800,000 families in all parts of Ha Noi would require a budget of VND135 billion (US$8 million), but if everyone uses them, it is thought VND513 billion (US$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 fishes, the project advises customers to use specialised wet-foods storing bags made of safe-for-health plastic materials, able to be re-used for about six months. The project is not providing these bags.

Preparatory activities for the first phase of the project began in March 2009; the goal is to have 100,000 less plastic bags used per day in daily retail activities 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 cutting off 1,000,000 plastic bags per day by the end of 2011, according to Luu.

VietNamNet/Viet Nam News