Over 200 Hanoi companies has already signed commitments to limit plastic waste in industrial production and consumption distribution. It is a great step for the country which suffers from huge volumes of garbage that can hardly be decomposed.
In Hanoi alone, there is a hundred of plastic producing enterprises. On distribution level, daily 24 shopping malls, 140 supermarkets, 454 traditional markets and thousands of shops hand out galopping numbers of plastic bags and other single-use plastic items to their customers. Out of 6,000 tonnes of domestic waste that is discharged on a daily bases, plastic accounts for about 10 percent, or about 60 tonnes.
Yet in many cases there seem to be very few opportunities in the sense of substitution for plastic. On the one hand, plastic production is cheap and use of plastic is convenient; on the other hand, while the government does encourage businesses to cut plastic production and discharge, no financial support like ease of taxation or lower loan rates is offered to those companies which are ready to shift to environment-friendly alternatives.
The city targets to ban plastic bags in all supermarkets by the next year and cut their usage at least by half in traditional markets by the end of 2020. By 2025, Hanoi plans to completely ban production of disposable plastic products.
No Plastic Bags, Single-Use Plastic in Hanoi by 2020
News in Asia
Plastic bags will be banned in all traditional markets in Hanoi by the end of the year. The municipal Industry and Commerce Department of the Vietnamese capital encourages business owners to join the anti-plastic campaign.