SINGAPORE - Five more hawker centres have done away with disposables for dine-in meals, the National Environment Agency (NEA) said on Friday (Dec 27).

This brings to 12 the total number of hawker centres that have dumped disposables for such meals.

The five hawker centres are located at Marsiling Mall, Block 163 Bukit Merah Central, Block 628 Ang Mo Kio Avenue 4, Block 84 Marine Parade Central and Block 16 Bedok South Road.

To cope with the increase in manpower needs, these centres have adopted common crockery and centralised dishwashing services.

The earlier seven are hawker centres that were built recently and disallowed from using disposables. They are in Bukit Panjang, Ci Yuan, Jurong West, Kampung Admiralty, Our Tampines Hub, Pasir Ris Central and Yishun Park.

These efforts are in line with Singapore's Year Towards Zero Waste, which aims to raise awareness of the need to reduce waste.

Separately, on Dec 2, supermarket chain Prime said it will expand its plastic bag charge initiative to all Prime food and grocer as well as Mahota outlets from February to April next year.

The initiative will require customers to pay an extra 10 cents for plastic bags. The money from the sale will be used to sponsor community building and environmental causes.

Prime began imposing the charge at Nanyang Technological University since November 2018.

Its move follows earlier efforts by other supermarket chains to encourage sustainable habits among customers.

In September, FairPrice began charging 10 cents or 20 cents for plastic bags at seven FairPrice and Cheers outlets in a month-long trial. Shoppers paid 20 cents per transaction for plastics bags at FairPrice, FairPrice Finest and FairPrice Xtra stores, and 10 cents per transaction at Cheers and FairPrice Xpress stores.

In July, eight supermarkets from Cold Storage, FairPrice, Prime Supermarket and Sheng Siong provided donation bins for unused and reusable bags from patrons which were redistributed for use.