FHKI 60th Anniversary Commemorative Album

To promote the development of a prospering recycling industry, the Government needs to implement relevant legislation to construct an effective mechanism. The Solid Waste Charging Scheme will be very important because it will change people’s daily life habit to help reduce waste. The Plastic Shopping Bag Charginghasalreadyprovedsuccessful.Wehope theGovernment will further improve and streamline the implementation details of the existing Producer Responsibility Schemes (PRS), including the PRS on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment. The recycling industry is also facing difficulties in financing. The Government should take the lead to promote green financing to offer low-interest loans to recycling enterprises. The Government can also subsidise transportation and sorting costs to companies that collect low-value but recyclable materials such as wooden building materials, so as to reduce the amount of these materials being sent to landfills. “We used to advocate for three Rs: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. I would like to add one more R – Revitalise or Reborn, that is, to turn the collected waste into raw materials for manufacturing of new products which will help increase the production value of environmental industries,” said Mr Jimmy Kwok. In Hong Kong one of the major obstacles of developing the recycling industry is the collection process. The lack of land resources and the dense population make it very difficult to find sites for treatment of the collected waste. The majority of the collected waste are exported offshore, mostly to the Mainland, for treatment. In 2017 the Mainland tightened the import of 24 categories of cyclable waste, including plastic and paper recyclables. It was then a crisis for local waste collection companies as they had nowhere to ship their goods. The Recycling Fund was timely to introduce the “Standard Project” funding aimed to facilitate SME local recyclers to upgrade their operation efficiency and enhance their capability to supply or to use local recyclables to make plastic or paper products. As the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area Initiative has been launched, we should explore the opportunities of undertaking win-win collaborations in the region, such as to support Hong Kong to carry out waste treatment on the Mainland. One possible cost-effective model is to set up networks of collection boxes in Hong Kong and ship the collected waste to the recycling production lines and factories located in the Greater Bay Area. This model will provide a solution to the land shortage problem encountered by the Hong Kong recycling industry. Federation of Hong Kong Industries 60 th Anniversary Commemorative Album 75