South Korea Bans Not Only Plastic Bags, but now Boxes at Supermarkets
The South Korean government really wants people to get used to shopping with reusable bags:
Plastic waste is a nagging headache for Asia’s fourth-largest economy. After banning plastic cups and bags, the government is now moving to ban paper boxes and packaging tapes.
Starting November, supermarkets will stop providing paper boxes and tape that shoppers can use to carry their groceries home, a move meant to encourage shoppers to use reusable shopping bags and reduce the plastic tape and string used for packing boxes, according to the environment ministry.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link, but the supermarkets must love the fact they can increase profits by selling the reusable bags all the while claiming they care about the environment.
I wish they would get rid of the baggers at the Commissaries instead, especially the Yongsan one. They have like 4 cash registers, but 10-15 baggers! I don’t need that service, but they are super agressive.
Environment Minister Cho Myung-rae is either ignorant, has bad staff, or wants Koreans to get sick. here is one article from 2014, so it’s not something new:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/01/06/reusable-grocery-bag-germs/4341739/
Also, what are people going to use to sort their household garbage as required by law? They need to buy other bags, probably plastic, and less likely to be biodegradable.
Here’s another article from 2013:
https://greensboroguardian.wordpress.com/2013/06/20/reusable-grocery-bags-filthy-and-counterproductive/
And the reusable bags cost more and cause more harm to the environment:
https://www.rd.com/home/cons-of-reusable-bags/
@Tyler Choi
I still think the baggers should just be school kids trying to make a few bucks. If you think they are aggressive now, see how they treat you when you don’t tip them, lol.
I always thought those old bums should have been fired and let dependents earn some pocket money from tips.
I use plastic crates I bought here, plastic bags are no longer free, so we have a fair sized collection of grocery bags, small, medium and large. For the weekly run we use the crates, for the daily run we use smaller bags. Haven’t been in a commissary since Clinton’s first term so I can only guess how things are. I don’t remember a lot of old guys, just kids and Asian men who out muscled the kids.
Funny how they’re banning all the stuff they said they were going to recycle.
“Funny how they’re banning all the stuff they said they were going to recycle.”
Not… exactly.
They are banning all the stuff they said they were going to send to China to recycle… very different thing… as China isn’t taking Korean waste anymore.
“In South Korea, a lesson to be learned from a plastic waste crisis
With trash piling up on the streets and recycling businesses losing money, the country was left scrambling for better solutions after China stopped buying its plastic waste, as Coming Clean About Green investigates.”
Will they still have straws for us differently-abled folks to use on drinks and soups, or are they going to be bigots as well as facilitators of e.coli, cholera, and typhus? That’s what I need to know…
Well my “they’re” was more of a global “they’re” considering this crusade’s playing out in the US as well but yup I get your point CH.
Smokes, I always wonder if all the global warming alarmism nonsense is a conspiracy of shared values (as opposed to a discussed conspiracy).
A lot of industries, including plastics, would much rather motivate the tree-huggers into hyperventilating over some sort of imaginary warming disaster proposed to happen in a hundred years than focus on current pollution and environmental destruction that unarguably will cause growing problems as time goes on.
With all that said, I have no problem with sensible steps to reduce pollution… encouraging a reduction in plastic bag use is a good one, as it is so easy to take your own bag to the store.