Excessive and careless use of plastic bags are plaguing Ho Chi Minh City. Goods are kept in plastic bags everyday and many aren't aware of its damaging effect on the environment.
Dozens of nylon bags waiting to be used by consumers.
Plastic bags have long been something that is very familiar to the life of people. They appear everywhere on the streets, in shops both big and small, at the markets, and inside the supermarkets. In daily life however, these nylon bags are being overused and used unnecessarily.
At a food street stall on Nguyen Oanh Road (Go Vap District, HCM City), DTiNews saw hundreds of different size plastic bags being used to keep rice, soup and even fish sauce. Everything was pre-packed to meet the demand of consumers during peak hours. For one portion of food here, at least 10 plastic bags are used; one for rice, one for plastic spoon, one for chopsticks, soup, fish sauce, meat juice, fresh vegetables, etc.
The owner of this street stall shared that everyday, they sell more than 100 portions of food and use more than 5kg of plastic bags and other plastic items. She said it is very common and anywhere we go, we could find the same thing.
At Huan’s grocery shop in Tan Binh District, plastic bags are hung right in front of the shop to make it convenient for buyers to use. The owner said, “Everyday my shop uses about 3kg's of plastic bags. I want to limit the use of these bags, but it’s very difficult. No one is going to buy things from my shop if there’s no bag.”
Many people are aware of the damaging effect plastic bags have on the environment. Unfortunately, this has not had much of an impact on peoples habits when they go out shopping for food. Plastic bags have become an essential thing in their everyday life.
Nguyen Thi Van, from Tan Phu District, said that in an effort to reduce her use of plastic bags, she had bought 2 reusable bags. However if she was not mistaken, the two bags were never even used once. She said she often goes shopping without planning beforehand which would make it very hard to avoid using plastic bags.
Nguyen Thi Thanh, a bank worker from District One shared, “I always have take-away food for lunch. Everything is packed in plastic bags. Everyone knows that it is bad but no one really cares. No one has died from eating food out of the plastic bags!”
Plastic bags and foam boxes are not only very damaging to the environment but also can be harmful for people when in contact with food.
Plastic bags are used for everything from food to drinks.
| According to the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Resources and Environment’s statistics at the end of September 2009, each person uses about 70 tonnes of plastic bags everyday, and 50 out of this 70 are nylon bags. If on average, a Vietnamese person used 1 plastic bag per day, that would mean in a day, 86 million nylon bags would be used, and within a year, the total number of bags used would be 31.4 billion. This is equal to 1 million tonnes of plastic. The amoung of plastic bags people use a year could easily cover the whole surface of the Earth with a width of 0.8mm. Plastic bags, when buried under the ground, would take 40 – 60 years to decompose. It is estimated that 9.3 billion tonnes of plastic bags per year are not collected and have to decompose by themselves. |
