About half of the city's 2,000 newspaper vendors are expected to stop pre-packing newspapers in plastic bags starting from Wednesday, an industry leader said yesterday.
'News merchants are asked not to pre-pack newspapers into plastic bags and should also encourage their customers not to take the plastic bags as well,' Tang Yup-ming, vice-chairman of the Hong Kong Newspaper Hawker Association, said. 'We have been giving out plastic bags since 1999 to compete with the convenience stores ... it soon turned out to be a disaster.' The association, along with the Coalition of Hong Kong Newspaper and Magazine Merchants and Greeners Action, is sending out notices to 2,000 newspaper merchants for a campaign titled 'No Plastic Bags for Newspapers', which will start on Wednesday.
Mr Tang said hawkers could give out up to one million newspapers a day, and a single hawker usually needed 7,000 plastic bags every 20 days.
He said this was an area of waste that 'the government should keep an eye on'.
The coalition carried out a survey of its members' views towards the campaign. 'Almost 50 per cent of the newspaper merchants said they were willing to join the campaign, while 20 per cent said they were worried about the impact on sales,' coalition chairman Liu Sair-ching said.
News-stands in Tuen Mun, Tsuen Wan and Central had already agreed to join the campaign, he added.