Supermarkets in active response

Supermarkets under the direct impact of the campaign have largely taken active actions to cope with the change.

Soon after the State Council promulgated the regulation, supermarkets, shops and drug stores in Kunming City, the provincial capital of the southwest Yunnan Province, started to offer diversified environment friendly plastic bags and nylon plastic bags for local residents to buy. Many businesses granted free environment friendly plastic bags when shoppers had bought a certain amount of goods.

On January 5, Wal-Mart supermarkets in Kunming extended 400 environment friendly shopping bags free to nearby local residents. They also set up prizes to encourage shoppers to use cloth bags and paper bags.

"Our promotion did not achieve satisfactory effects. Few people returned to shop with cloth bags in our supermarkets," said Dong Yu of Yunnan Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.

The three Wal-Mart supermarkets in Kunming are said to use about 10,000 plastic bags each hour.

"Cultivating people with the habit of using as few plastic shopping bags is the first step to say no to white pollution," said Xiao Xinhe of the public relations department of Kunming Carrefour Hypermarket Co. Ltd.

Xiao's hypermarket is lined with plastic shopping bags of diversified sizes, as well as environment-friendly bags, nylon bags and small shopping go-carts.

"These shopping bags would bear goods from 6 kilograms to 20 kilograms, and they will satisfy demands of most shoppers,"Xiao said.

Since retailers are allowed to set their own prices for plastic bags, only that they can't be below cost, a lot of supermarkets charged 0.2 yuan (.028 U.S. cents) to 0.3 yuan per small plastic bag and 0.4 yuan to 0.5 yuan per big plastic bag. Shoppers largely said they were a little expensive.

Most Chinese shoppers say they support the government's move to restrict the use of plastic shopping bags.

"It is good to use fewer plastic shopping bags, as it helps to reduce pollution and benefit our children," said some old fellows enjoying the cool near the sport center of Jinan, capital city of the eastern Shandong Province.

Granny Chen from Ma'anshan Road of Jinan said she had searched out her bamboo shopping baskets that she put aside for so many years, since supermarkets would charge for the use of plastic bags.

"In the 1980s, we used to carry bamboo baskets on the arm to buy vegetables and meat in fairs. When we met acquaintances on the road, we would stop and chat, looking at what they bought and asking about prices. It felt so good," said Chen.

Different from the elders, young guys largely say they would go on using plastic shopping bags, even if they are charged. It is somewhat embarrassing for them to hold bamboo baskets to shop on streets, they confess.

Whatever they choose, either bamboo baskets or plastic bags, old and young shoppers generally agreed that plastic shopping bags are charged a little too high.

"We understand that the government sets up the charging rule for the purpose of reducing the use of plastic bags. But it is still too expensive for us to buy a plastic bag for 0.2 yuan or more," said Wang Zhiliang, a rural migrant worker at a building site in the southern part of Jinnan.

Each day, Wang's building site would buy box rice from neighboring snack bars. They would use quite a few plastic bags to bring back the box rice. "We will feel distressed to pay 0.5 yuan for a plastic bag when our meal costs only 5 yuan each."

In a Carrefour hypermarket in Jinan, a plastic bag bearing 10 kg of goods is charged as much as 1 yuan (0.14 U.S. dollar) each. Many shoppers complain the hypermarket is simply "robbing money" from their pockets.