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Following is the transcript (English portion) of a media session given by the Secretary for the Environment, Mr Edward Yau, when he attended an event to celebrate the first anniversary of the environmental levy scheme on plastic shopping bags today (July 4):
Reporter: How do you find the effectiveness of this plastic bag levy?
Secretary for the Environment: Looking back in the past 12 months, we have seen a clear success of bring your own bag campaign brought about by the plastic shopping bag levy. For the government revenue, we have only collected one tenth of the money that we intend to collect from this levy, which is a clear demonstration that people are shifting to bringing your own bag instead of spending that 50 cents. But I think more importantly, it is a behavioural change. It is a consensus building that people are voting by their action to join this green campaign. So I think with this success, we should consider to what extent we can further extend this scheme or further extend the producer responsibility scheme to cover other products because if we want Hong Kong to be a greener city, I think every citizen should join in and act now.
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)
Ends/Sunday, July 4, 2010
Issued at HKT 18:15
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