Saturday, February 02, 2008

After reading what Shanglin posted about Ireland finally getting rid of their plastic bag habit, I thought of what I had seen in India. In India, they are more environmentally advanced than most of us are. Purchases are usually wrapped in old newspaper if they are small; big purchases are given a recycled paper bag or once, in Darjeeling, I even got a small cloth bag to put some jars of jam and pickles I just bought.

So yes, while here we are getting plastic bags with every single purchase, it seems like India has skipped a step and gone straight to environmental friendly newspapers, paper and cloth bags.

I'm totally in support of imposing taxes on plastic bags. Let's move on from the half-hearted measure of the "first Wednesday of every month", and start charging people for plastic bags. Start with $0.10 per plastic bag; kiam siap Singaporeans will soon resort to resuable or cloth bags, as they have done in Ikea.

Ikea Singapore has started to impose a charge of $0.10 per bag and today, while I was at the check-out counter, I saw many aunties bringing their own little bags - they had obviously caught wind of the plastic bag charges here and wisened up.

Well done, Ikea. Why stop there? Why not Giant, Carrefour, NTUC and Cold Storage as well? The money earned from the sale of plastic bags can be donated to Nature Society, or be used to plant trees to offset our carbon footprint (as Oasis Hong Kong Airlines has done so, using carbon credits to buy energy credits for a windfarm in China).

That's my chip-in for the environment today. I also didn't use any plastic bags when buying the stuff at Ikea. What have you done for the environment today?

Mrs Brightside at 10:34 pm

{xoxo}