ParknShop came under fire yesterday for a poster depicting a tsunami of plastic bags as part of its deliberately shocking campaign to cut plastic bag use. The poster shows a wave of plastic bags sweeping the Earth, with South and Southeast Asia exposed.
Launching the campaign in its Tseung Kwan O store yesterday, the supermarket's managing director, Philippe Giard, said the image was intended to be striking enough to deliver the message of plastic bag pollution.
'The imagery we are using for this campaign - a giant wave in a sea of plastic - is deliberately strong and some might say shocking,' he said.
But the design was criticised as being 'inconsiderate' to the feelings of relatives of the 28 Hongkongers who died in the Boxing Day tsunami.
Hahn Chu Hon-keung, environmental affairs manager of Friends of the Earth, said the poster might be 'strange and unpleasant', adding it would have been wiser for the supermarket to place Hong Kong under threat of the 'tsunami'.
Siu King-chung, who teaches art and design criticism at Polytechnic University's School of Design, warned that people might associate the material with the horror of the tsunami disaster.
'Some designers want to make provocative work so as to trigger public discussion, regardless of whether they are politically correct or not,' he said.