Wowzers… awesome!

“It started with San Francisco, Hong Kong, then Melbourne and other cities, and now, beginning in July, all plastic shopping bags in the entire country of China will no longer be free. As part of China’s attempts to reduce their extreme pollution problem, the policy will call for a small charge for plastic bags in China that must be shown clearly in all supermarket receipts.

Furthermore, ultra-thin plastic bags are now banned from being produced at all. As part of this effort, the government is encouraging the use of reusable bags and cloth sacks, and increasing efforts to recycle all plastic bags still in use.”

Via Inhabitat (Source IHT)
Australia does the same via Treehugger.

I’ve have a few reusable bags, but always forget to bring them to the store. Until it’s law, I’m going to forget, and besides, I use my paper bags as trash cans which has been handy.

FYI: statically and visually according to Chris Jordan, we use “60,000 plastic bags every 5 seconds in the USA alone!” (1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags are used in the USA every hour.)

I guess it’s time to go pick up one of those cool reusable bags:
– Porter Grocery Tote (paper like plastic bag)
– Muji portable Bag, (I can’t find online, but it’s in the nyc soho store)
– Flip and Tumble (A bag that turns into a puck)
– AMT Shopper Bag (Louis Vuitton like print bags)

update: I was just at Wholefoods and they said they were starting to ban usage of plastic bags this week/month! Ah, heres an article.