Liu Minxia

WITH the government set to initiate a campaign against plastic bags from June, cloth bags are the most popular items at an ongoing gift fair that opened Friday at Shenzhen Convention and Exhibition Center.

Among the 2,700 exhibitors at the 16th China (Shenzhen) international gifts fair, which closes today, about 20 are cloth bag manufacturers from Shenzhen and other mainland regions, according to Reed Huabo Exhibitions Co., organizer of the fair. It marks the first time in the exhibition’s 16-year history that so many cloth bag manufacturers are participating, according to Kelly Luo, a spokesperson with the Shenzhen office of Reed Huabo.

“Even other kinds of exhibitors prefer to distribute advertising bags made of cloth to visitors and these bags are well received as people consider them a convenient tool,” Luo said.

The booths of the cloth bag makers are among the busiest at the fair. “Many supermarket and department store operators came to make inquiries and the number of potential clients exceeded our expectations,” Zhang Ya, owner of Taizhou Lingke Trading Co. of Zhejiang Province, said yesterday. Zhang’s company, attending the fair for the first time, was established last year and started with 100 employees. After the Central Government announced the ban on free plastic bags earlier this year, the company’s business started to boom and its number of employees has tripled, according to Zhang.

“According to a rough estimate, we expect to receive orders worth a total of 10 million yuan (US$1.43 million) from this fair,” Zhang said. “After going back, we are going to recruit 300 more workers.”

Other cloth bag makers at the fair claimed to be witnessing a similar upswing. “We received a large number of visitors, including some of the bigger supermarkets in Shenzhen,” said Liao Shuyan, general manager of Shenzhen Dongtai Nonwoven Fabric Co., a Shenzhen-based cloth bag maker which exports half its products to the United States and Japan.

“But most of them didn’t place any order right away. Maybe that’s because, I guess, they are still waiting until June to see whether the government will implement the rules strictly,” Liao said. “But we think that the rules will finally benefit us and our sales in the domestic market will grow markedly later this year.”

More than 1,000 potential customers made detailed inquiries and some of them placed orders with Jun’s Workshop, a cloth bag designer and manufacturer in Futian District. Zhuang Miaojun, general manager of Jun’s Workshop, expects his company’s production and sales to double later this year.

China is going to ban free plastic bags at shops and supermarkets starting June 1, according to rules issued by the State Council in January. Companies caught breaking the new rules would face fines, the government said. China currently uses up to 3 billion plastic shopping bags a day.

The rules have caused China’s largest plastic bag maker, Suiping Huaqiang Plastic Co. in Henan Province, to close. The company, which made most of its 2.2-billion-yuan revenue from the annual production of 250,000 tons of plastic bags, shut down about one month after the rules were unveiled. Other plastic bag manufacturers have also been affected.

Shenzhen Chun Hing Plastic Bag Co., a large plastic bag maker based in Bao’an District, has started to manufacture reusable bags in order to adapt to the change in rules, Jennie Pan, sales executive of the company, said yesterday at the fair.