Al Gore's been here

Hong Kong Local time Tuesday 11:00pm

That's the view I took from our hotel room last week. Last Tuesday I was at a convenient store paying for a soda when the clerk said she wasn’t going to give me a paper bag. I took it to mean that she must have ran out. Then she explained that her store was part of a chain of stores that agreed to not give out plastic bags on Tuesdays to help protect the environment. If I really wanted a plastic bag, I could get one in return for donating 20 cents (2.5 pennies USD) to an environmental fund.

After I returned to the hotel room, I saw on the news that one of the larger supermarket chains in Hong Kong announced it was going to stop giving out plastic bags altogether, unless the customer was willing to cough up the 2.5 pennies per bag. The announcement didn’t prove too popular with customers and the chain announced today that it would go back to giving customers plastic bags for free.