The elimination of plastic bags: A customer perspective on logistics challenges

Plastic bags have become synonymous with the culture of our society today. The use of plastic bags is very widespread and facilitates the consumers especially in facilitating them to carry goods such as supermarkets, retail stores, and others. Every year nearly 1 trillion shopping plastic bags have been used, as they are easy to carry, cheap, and convenient to use. But with constant use, it has had a negative impact not only on the environment but also on the logistics perspective. In response, the Malaysian government has launched a campaign to discourage the use of plastic bags known as a 'No Plastic Bag Day''. The objective of the program is to educate the consumer on the impact of plastic bags on the environment. However, this campaign has drawn a mixed response from the customer which is against the traditional practice of using a plastic bag as many of the customers still fail to bring their bag for packing their purchased items. As such, this study aims to investigate the impact of the campaign from the logistics perspective by examining the relationship between logistics challenges and customer awareness on the implementation of the campaign. This research used a quantitative method by distributing a questionnaire to understand the customer perspective toward the logistics challenges on the elimination of plastic packaging. A total of 132 questionnaires were completed and returned for analysis by SPSS. The findings of this study, contribute a significant impact on logistical challenges in terms of the safety of goods, material handling, and customer readiness on the implementation of the campaign. According to the inferential analysis that was conducted from the data collected, customer readiness was the best factor that influenced the level of customer awareness on the elimination of plastic usage for shopping. Whereas the variable of customer readiness and safety & security which are less than 0.05 shows a unique contribution to the dependent variable. Based on the current research, the recommendations that can be made for future research are by doing a mixed-method and expand the scope of the study to get a better understanding of the localized perception before developing the mass survey.