Wal-Mart’s Plastic Bag Reduction Strategy in Central America
Wal-Mart Central America is pursuing an interesting strategy to achieve its announced target of a 50% reduction in plastic bag use in its more than 500 stores in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua by 2013. Whereas its brethren in Brazil have elected to offer discounts for consumers bringing their own alternatives to plastic bags to their stores and selling cheaply cloth reusable bags, Wal-Mart Central America has elected to offer reusable shopping bags made from recycled PET. Each bag, says Wal-Mart, represents about four recycled PET bottles and is spacious and strong enough to hold the contents that three regular plastic carry bags would hold (most plastic carry bags are made from polyethylene, most often low density polyethylene – LDPE).
As in Brazil, Wal-Mart is testing the system first in some of their supermarket formats (La Unión in Nicaragua, for example) before implementing it across-the-board. Wal-Mart Central America is also passing out free reusable bags to 3,000 shoppers at every new discount store that they open.
This is an interesting twist to Wal-Mart’s plastic bag campaign — instead of offering cotton bags, offer recycled PET bags, thus both promoting the reduction of flimsy PE bags and boosting the market for recycled PET (rPET) at the same time.
Fuente: http://www.temasactuales.com/