China is to ban shops from handing out free plastic bags in one of its most ambitious environmental measures yet aimed at the consumer. Plastic bag ban set for London The plastic bag debate The state council, or cabinet, said the country's use of three billion plastic bags a day was putting "intolerable pressure" on the country's environment and resources, and steps had to be taken to stem their use. As well as imposing a compulsory as yet unspecified charge on plastic carrier bags, the government said it would ban ultra-thin plastic bags altogether. Both measures would come into force on June 1.
"We should encourage people to return to carrying cloth bags, using baskets for their vegetables," the notice announcing the ban said.
"Plastic shopping bags, due to reasons such as excessive use and inefficient recycling, have caused serious energy and resources waste and environment pollution," it added. "The super thin bags (those thinner than 0.025 mm) have especially become a main source of plastic pollution as they are easy to break and thus disposed of carelessly." With household consumption a fraction of levels found in the west, the ordinary householder's contribution to China's environmental crisis has received little attention so far. Internationally, China attracts more attention for the levels of its greenhouse emissions, which according to some estimates are the highest in the world, despite its economy still lagging America's, Japan's and Germany's according to standard models. advertisement Its murky skies are also a subject of controversy, particularly in the year Beijing, the world's most polluted capital, welcomes hundreds of thousands of visitors for the Olympic Games. But households are also accustomed to take little care of their waste. In the past, the economics of poverty dictated that everything that could be reused was, but the burgeoning middle classes no longer see so much need to take plastic bottles back to the shop for the fraction of a penny "return" value. The consequences can be seen in the growing mounds of rubbish spreading across eastern China. Plastic bags float in the rivers and in the breeze even across the deserts and mountains of the interior. Beijing alone discards 2.3 billion plastic bags a year. Britain uses an estimated 10 billion plastic bags a year, according to government figures. As part of its wide-ranging plans, finance authorities will consider tax incentives to discourage the production of plastic bags and encourage recycling, and state standards for bag production will be revised. It also announced more encouragement for firms separating bags out from waste for reprocessing. Whole towns in southern China now have pillar industries based on the cutting up of plastic bags from round the world - including Britain - and converting them into pellets to be sold back to plastic factories. Bag charges are already in place in other countries, as well as in Taiwan, while experiments such as the "I'm not a plastic bag" carrier bag have had their moment - except in China, where it was banned for fear of repeats of stampedes that took place in Hong Kong when they went on sale. The Chinese special economic zone of Shenzhen, which discards 1.7 billion bags a year, first suggested similar measures last year, but they met with considerable consumer opposition. Similar environmental measures have a track record of being ignored.
The People's Republic of China has banned free plastic shopping bags in a move to take effect from June 1, 2008. The decision made by the Chinese Cabinet, the State Council, is intended to reduce the amount of plastic bags used in China, currently being estimated at three billion per day. The State Council also announced that at the same time as the ban, the manufacturing, sale and even use of very thin plastic bags, which are defined as being under 0.025mm thick, will be banned. Any company that does not follow this ban can be fined. 

The ban of free plastic bags and complete ban on very thin bags will, the government hopes, help reduce the amount of crude oil used for plastic packaging, which is currently at five million tonnes per year according to ''Times Online''. The notice issued by the Chinese government said: “We should encourage people to return to carrying cloth bags, using baskets for their vegetables.”

The People's Republic of China is not the first country to ban or restrict plastic shopping bags and the notice names Uganda and South Africa according to ''CNN''. Many supermarkets in the European Union have voluntarily adopted methods to reduce usage of plastic bags, which often also consist of charging for bags (e.g. Germany) or rewarding customer loyalty points for returning used carrier bags. Still, many of the world's leading polluting countries, including the United States of America, have not yet introduced any legislation intended to reduce the usage of plastic bags. The United States Environmental Protection Agency claimed that in 2000 only 1% of plastic bags in the United States were recycled. 

The People's Republic of China has attracted a lot of attention in the past for having possibly the highest greenhouse emissions in the world, disproportionate to the size of its economy, according to ''The Telegraph''. ''Times Online'' quoted a Chinese activist as saying that plastic bags are not the main problem and the government needed to make people care more about the environment.