Hong Kong’s tourism has only piled on the pressure. As the region’s industries moved to mainland China, the region made an active bid to attract more visitors from the mainland to boost its economy. It now brings around 60 million additional people to the islands per year (nearly seven times the permanent population), with around 70% coming from mainland China. Hong Kong’s cuisine and shopping malls are both among the key attractions, meaning that each of those visitors will generate a lot of additional food and packing waste. “We need them to boost our economy, but there are also drawbacks,” says Chan.

Compounding these problems is Hong Kong’s status as a ‘free economy’, which means that the government is reluctant to impose regulations that may threaten trade. “It’s supposed to be the most free economy in the world, so government officials try their best not to intervene in any way with our production lines, or consumer behaviours,” says Chan. For this reason, there is currently little legislation on product packaging, for instance, or any other measures that could reduce waste.

Operation Green Fence

Along with many other countries, Hong Kong had once offloaded some of its rubbish to mainland China for recycling. While Chinese businesses were able to make use of scrap metals, plastics, and rare metals in electronic goods, it also often came with unusable and contaminated leftovers (including food and medical waste) – creating further environmental issues for Chinese cities. As a result, the government decided to ban the importing of unprocessed materials – a move known as a “Green Fence” – in the hope that other countries would clean up their material before selling the valuable stuff.

Unfortunately, Hong Kong has not yet developed enough of its own recycling plants to compensate for the changing policy. “So stuff that would have been sent to China to be processed is just being put in the landfill,” says Doug Woodring, an environmental campaigner and co-founder of the Ocean Recovery Alliance, who I meet after my conversation with Chan.