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  Today 11 Feb 05
Plastic bags binned as shopping goes green
To help cut usage, Parkway Parade using reusable bags
Lee U-Wen u-wen@newstoday.com.sg

IF you happen to drop by Parkway Parade Shopping Centre today, don't be surprised if the cashier puts your purchases into a reusable bag, instead of the usual plastic bag.

The manager of the mall in Marine Parade has produced 10,000 reusable bags made of recyclable material and will distribute them to nearly 50 retailers to give out to their customers today.

Colourful posters, pamphlets and banners all bearing the "Go Green" message to use such bags have also been prominently displayed in the shopping centre and inside each of its 259 retail outlets.

It is all part of a long-term goal to become an environmentally-friendly shopping centre, said Ms Tracy Vi, the centre manager of Lend Lease, which manages the mall.

Incidentally, Parkway Parade is also the venue where a new national campaign to discourage the excessive use of plastic bags will be launched on Saturday morning by Environment and Water Resources Minister Yaacob Ibrahim. Among the 15 participating retailers are all the leading supermarkets such as Cold Storage, Cheers, NTUC FairPrice and its subsidiaries, as well as furniture giant Ikea. In total, the campaign will boast some 600 stores islandwide.

The move comes less than a year after a debate on how to curb Singapore's increasing plastic bag usage was sparked by a Today news comment highlighting the billions of bags being used here.

Last year, the National Environment Agency revealed to Today that Singaporeans use 2.5 billion plastic bags each year, or about 2,500 bags per family each year. In total, these bags weigh up to 19,000 tonnes — or 0.8 per cent — of the total waste disposed of in Singapore annually.

Such an islandwide effort to curb plastic bag usage was nowhere in sight a year ago. The overriding concern in the past for retailers, especially the smaller businesses, was: If they banned or started charging for plastic bags at their store, customers would be angered and take their business elsewhere.

This argument led environmentalists to comment that an initiative to discourage plastic bags could work only if major supermarket chains such as NTUC FairPrice and Cold Storage came forward to show their support.

Indeed, Lend Lease's marketing manager Jenny Khoo said that convincing each of its retailers to support the cause is proving a difficult task. "We can't enforce it as this has to be voluntary on their part too. They have to see it as part of their overall business objective and social responsibility," she said.

But cutting down on plastic bag usage is not the only way Parkway Parade is going green. Last June, it brought in a waste composter that collects food waste generated in the shopping centre and converts it into soil conditioner, a useful organic material for farming. The composter manages about 30 per cent of the centre's total waste and has so far resulted in a 4 per cent cost saving in waste disposal.
links
More about the involvement of the Toddycats (volunteers of the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research), the Nature Society (Singapore) and other nature groups in this effort at Parkway Paradae on the Raffles Museum blog

Related articles wild shores and Singapore: plastic bags efforts to reduce use of plastic bags, issues, discussions

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