Almost all Hong Kong shops now charge 50-cent plastic bag levy

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Almost all Hong Kong shops now charge 50-cent plastic bag levy

No more verbal warnings; offenders now risk HK$2,000 fine or prosecution

PUBLISHED : Friday, 01 May, 2015, 5:20am
UPDATED : Friday, 01 May, 2015, 5:20am

Fanny W. Y. Fung [email protected]

Enforcement of phase two of Hong Kong's plastic bag levy scheme will be flexible for the first month starting from April 1. Photo: Felix Wong

Less than 1 per cent of shops inspected in the first month of the expanded plastic shopping bag levy scheme breached the new law, the Environment Protection Department announced at the conclusion of the grace period yesterday.

Starting from today, officers will no longer give verbal warnings before enforcing the law on retailers who fail to collect the mandatory 50-cent charge.

The department will send mystery shoppers to check compliance and offenders risk a HK$2,000 fine and possible prosecution.

From the beginning of the expanded scheme on April 1 until yesterday, the department gave 75 verbal warnings to non-complying shops out of the 9,300 which were inspected.

The most common contravention occurred on food with sealed packaging, environment minister Wong Kam-sing said. "Food products with sealed packaging are not exempted under the law. This type of verbal warnings accounted for more than half of the total," he told Commercial Radio.

The scheme, which previously targeted some 3,000 shops including supermarket chains, convenience stores and department stores, has now been extended to cover all types of shops. Some retailers and consumers have complained that a number of exemptions are confusing.

Some Southeast Asian food vendors were not clear about the new law and the department has put information online in Tagalog and Indonesian languages, Wong said.

A green group which launched a campaign between December and April said consumers had shown a reasonable level of knowledge about the levy.

Angus Wong Chun-yin, policy advocacy manager for the World Green Organisation, said: "The most common confusion arose from frozen food. When we staged campaigns in malls some shoppers would complain to us that they had been wrongly charged for bags to pack frozen food ... this shows they are aware of the exemption.

"However, more work may need to be done to explain to consumers that shops may exempt the levy on plastic bags for frozen food under the new law, but are not required to do so."