Protesting plastic bag charge, Turks shop with donkey, wheelbarrow

ISTANBUL

Turkish citizens have come up with novel ways to protest the newly-adopted extra charges for plastic bags, entering supermarkets with donkeys and wheelbarrows. 

In the Central Anatolian province of Niğde, a man and a woman rode a donkey into a supermarket and calmly left with it after loading what they shopped.

As a separate incident, the 37-year-old Arif Arifoğlu in the eastern province of Erzurum shared footage on his social media accounts showing him riding a wheelbarrow in a supermarket for the same purpose.

Under a new government regulation introduced on Jan. 1, grocery stores in Turkey are obligated to charge customers 25 kuruş — 0.25 Turkish Liras — for a single plastic bag.

If authorities determine that a store is giving plastic bags to customers free of charge, the store will be fined 10 Turkish Liras ($1.85) per each square meter of their property.

Some people simply switched to classic string bags for multiple use, while others decided to protest the new charge by posting tongue-in-cheek videos online.

In one video, a woman was seen sewing her old plastic bags to repair them.