Amount of waste Hong Kong generates has peaked, environment minister says

The amount of rubbish Hong Kong generates has peaked, the environment chief has said, a success he attributed to government efforts to promote recycling, half a year after the government shelved a pay-as-you-throw waste-charging scheme.

The city also threw out nearly 2 billion fewer plastic bags last year compared with 2022, official figures showed. The levy on the bags was doubled to HK$1 (13 US cents) in December 2022.

Posting on his official blog on Sunday, Secretary for Environment and Ecology Tse Chin-wan said the amount of rubbish generated was “on a steady decline”, noting the daily quantity per person fell from 1.51kg (3.3lbs) in 2022 to 1.44kg last year, a drop of 4.7 per cent.

“In the past 10 years, the average amount of waste that each person disposed of increased from 1.35kg in 2014 to 1.53kg in 2018. The amount dropped during the pandemic but rose sharply afterward,” he wrote.

“The current administration actively promoted waste reduction and recycling, expanded and improved the recycling network, and started food waste recycling. We saw the waste quantity has reached a peak and started declining steadily.”

For the city as a whole, the daily quantity of waste on average last year was 10,884 tonnes, a 2.2 per cent decrease from 2022, and down by 4.2 per cent from 2021.