State Trading Organization (STO) will stop using plastic bags and switch to paper bags from August 1.

STO's Managing Director Hussain Amru revealed this while speaking at Maldivian Democratic Party’s (MDP’s) online forum at Clubhouse on Tuesday.

He said that STO’s pharmacies will be switching to paper bags from plastic bags in order to be more environmentally friendly.

Amru stated that the new policy would be implemented from August 1st and that it would put a stop to the one million plastic bags being imported by the company yearly. He added this is to support the government's efforts to be rid of plastic pollution by the year 2023.

President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, at the74th session of the United Nations General Assembly held in 2019, announced the government's vision to phase out single-use plastics from the Maldives by the year 2023. He launched the campaign to eliminate single-use plastic about a year prior, in December 2018. Minimizing the use of single-use plastics was also one of Solih’s first 100-day-pledges.

While the president approved the plan to phase-out single-use plastics by 2023 on 5 November 2020, he issued a decree announcing amendments to the list of single-use plastics banned from import into the Maldives this June. Further, in December, he publicized a list of single-use plastics to be banned for import into the country starting from 1st June 2021.

However, deadlines for some of the items were extended this year to December 2021 while the implementation date for the import ban on carbonated and non-carbonated drinks in plastic packaging was amended to 1 June 2022.