Status Green: South Island's first plastic-bag-free supermarketJOSEPH JOHNSON/STUFF Lyttelton Supervalue owner Rob De Thier with one of the replacement bags used at his soon-to-be plastic bag-free supermarket. By the start of June, de Thier's SuperValue supermarket in the port town of Lyttelton, near Christchurch, will be single-use plastic bag free, the first South Island supermarket to make the commitment. Progressive Enterprises, which owns Countdown, SuperValue and FreshChoice supermarkets, will ban plastic bags at Countdown by the end of 2018. Nine months ago they "took the first step" and removed plastic bags from their produce section, replacing them with paper bags. "We started selling the paper bags at about 3pm last Tuesday (April 17), and we've sold about 500 of them already.

Source: Stuff April 24, 2018 07:30 UTC