Saigon Co.op becomes first retailer to stop selling plastic straws

Banana leaves are used to wrap vegetables at a supermarket - Photo: VNA

This is the first retail system in Vietnam to stop selling plastic straws.

Deputy Director General of Saigon Co.op Nguyen Anh Duc said that in the long run, his firm will also remove plastic straws attached to its private label products. It will ask retailers inside its stores to minimise the use of plastic straws.

Saigon Co.op is also replacing plastic bags with banana leaves as an environmentally-friendly material to wrap food, he added.

In 2011, the firm became the first to replace single-use plastic bags with bio-degradable ones.

The Ministry of Industry and Trade said the use of bio-degradable bags and banana leaves to wrap food is amongst the significant efforts by Saigon Co.op to reduce the quantity of plastic bags in circulation to help protect the environment.

Many countries like the US, the Republic of Korea, and China have banned or issued a roadmap for prohibiting the use of this type of plastic product.

In Vietnam, the Government has imposed an environmental tax rate of 100-250 percent of the production cost of 1 kg of single-use plastic bags. However, problems in tax collection have hampered the development of bio-degradable bag producers.

The ministry aimed to reduce 65 percent of single-use plastic bags used at supermarkets and shopping malls by 2020 compared to 2010. Vietnam hopes to eliminate disposable plastic bags by 2026.