Dubai Municipality drive to cut use of 500m plastic bags by year-end

Dubai: The municipality on Thursday launched its “Say No to Plastic Bags” campaign that aims to reduce 500 million plastic bags from being used by consumers by the year’s end.

Abdullah Al Gaffari, head of Customer Services Unit of the Waste Management Department, told Gulf News on Thursday that the campaign will continue for six months, and will target supermarkets across the emirate.

“We started preparing for the campaign three weeks ago, and we received a great deal of interest from participating outlets. Many of the supermarkets wondered whether we were imposing a ban on plastic bags, and this is not the case at all. We are merely raising the awareness of consumers to change their habits and to stop using non-biodegradable plastic bags,” said Al Gaffari.

“We’re looking to reduce plastic bags by 20 per cent of the total amount used by the end of the year, and we want to reduce it by a further 15 per cent in 2014 as well,” he said.

During the month of May, Dubai Municipality will distribute one jute bag to each customer, in addition to campaign flyers, which will be distributed to educate consumers about the dangers of using plastic products.

For the month of May, the campaign will be carried out at Union Co-operatives in Al Hamriya, Jumeirah, Al Aweer and Al Safa.

A total of 190 supermarkets will participate in the campaign during the next six months, involving over 60 volunteers from the Dubai Volunteering Centre, which operates under the Community Development Authority.

“Non-biodegradable bags are extremely harmful to the environment, so through this campaign, we want to encourage the public to use alternatives that will save the environment, as well as changing their habits,” said Al Gaffari.

“This campaign was carried out as per the recommendations of the Ministry of Environment and Water, who already carried out a similar campaign last year in Abu Dhabi,” he said.

As of Thursday, volunteers will visit supermarkets every Thursday, Friday and Saturday and offer grocery shoppers one free jute bag to carry their food items. The message is that the same jute bag can be used time and again for future grocery store runs and negates the need for plastic bags.

In June, the campaign will be carried out in Emirates Co-operative stores in Al Twar, Oud Al Mateena and Hatta. The campaign will then continue to Carrefour supermarkets in July, LuLu supermarkets in August, and across Spinneys and Hyper Panda supermarkets in September and October.

The Ministry of Environment and Water, for example, said it will ban in early 2014 non-biodegradable plastic products from being issued in the UAE.

In 2008, Gulf News launched a sweeping public awareness campaign “No to Plastic Bags” to educate its readers about the dangers of plastic bags to humans and wildlife. Gulf News distributed 200,000 jute bags to the public to encourage the use of ecologically sound bags as an alternative to plastic.