Major Retailers Start Charging For Plastic Bags

[DickFarang]

When I go to swim at Jomtien Beach I see lots of plastic and all kind of imaginable litter floating in the sea but, strange enough, never ever bags from 7Eleven, Tesco, Carrefour, etc.

[tracer]

VERY surprised that everyone is so much in favour of eliminating plastic bags with no real alternative. What does everybody use to line their rubbish bins? Paper would be OK for most rubbish in living areas and bedrooms, IF these are provided, but leaky kitchen waste is completely different. unless of course one installs a waste disposal unit (good idea, may do that!) Someone mentioned that they have 4 canvas type bags, we have more but a single shop at Tops may use 20 bags when I only meant to use 4. Will they sell extra bags cheap or do I leave the rest of my shopping there? Good idea for the environment but not thought out enough to work properly

I use 1 Ocean pack 15kg diving bag for shopping and after a few years its still alive and contents stay sofar dry, even today in the terrible rain. I also use another similar pack from Procycle, sold in Sweden, made in Germany. Again so far its surviving good and for shopping I find it a pity I never knew of them before. The Ocean pack is available in most dive shops... but after the lousy season no idea what stock situation is.

Obviously it could have been a lot better planned, ie why start in beginning of the the tourist season because I can guarantee that of the tourists we will get something like this, if stupidly introduced, will only piss tourists off even if done in a different way they might have been happy...

Its quite obvious that we have too many plastic bags but paper bags are useless if they starts falling to pieces especially with food inside... I have driven both my packs on a motorbike, including via 2 accidents and they survived including what was in them... AND including this years extremely lousy weather in Phuket.

I can understand that plastic bags cost money but NOT what buyers have to pay; clearly looks like a rip-off if shops keep the money. Have they by any chance considered collecting all the bag-money as a tax to be used for the cleanup??

And using some biodegradable quality?? Shouldn't be that difficult to have the in general thin plastic bags fall to pieces after a few days if they get wet... They might be able to send a plastic bag collector car around to collect them and the material to make new bags. To me the new scheme looks more made to give more money to the shops...

[fiercesnake]

This will require some heavy training of the Tesco employees.. It's not the customers who pack into bags, the Tesco employees love to pack a single item in each bag. Things already bagged (could be dog food, rice, washing detergent etc) they are especially of packing into a smaller useless bag with a Tesco logo on it.

Spot on! Gosh I find I have to politely correct the young girls and they don't seem to understand what I'm doing or why, in trying to reduce the use of stupid plastic bags that they have a monstrous fascination with here. But then again this just shows the weakness of the government education system. It trains most Thais well to read, write, survive in their day to day society and most of all comply!!! But what it fails to do at every turn is to educate the average Thai to think more deeply about the world around them. But then again the rich here all know that an educated populous is much harder to control than a compliant one!

Plastic bags is just one issue but which is indicative of a huge number of other problems within Thai society which are oft not discussed or addressed. But at least this seems a step in the right direction.

[robert00]

About time!!!!! this has been done in Austria for doney years and even in some parts of Australia. Good one hope it helps to clean the place up.

[ernieK24]

In my country you are heavily fined for littering. This seems to do the trick. And each supermarket provides a place to deposit your used plastic bags, and the supermarket, I'm assuming, sells them back to the company that manufactures them.

[LivinginKata]

Phuket bag charge delayed by two months

Follow this update ---->

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/Phuket-Bag-C...ar-t315287.html

This topic old news and is now closed. Continue reading as above...