Hotels put bottles on path to green future
The beer bottles you throw away may be turned into paving stones.
In an effort to reduce waste, 11 hotels will recycle their glass bottles for the first time in an industry-funded programme.
Administered by the Hong Kong Hotels Association, hotels including the Four Seasons, the Hyatt, the Marriott and The Peninsula will pay for delivery to a recycler, where glass will be crushed into sand and mixed with cement to form paving stones.
'We started with hotels because they generate a lot of glass waste every day,' Secretary for the Environment Edward Yau Tang-wah said yesterday at the Cultural Centre in Tsim Sha Tsui. 'If this programme is successful, we will be happy to expand it to other areas.'
Mr Yau said such paving stones had already been used in Tuen Mun's EcoPark and in housing estates.
This is the first time glass bottles from hotels are being recycled. Some 40 hotels have been recycling plastic bottles since 2000.
Hotels will pay about HK$3,000 a month for the delivery of glass waste to recyclers, said James Lu Shien-kwai, executive director of the hotels association. He hoped more hotels would join the programme.
A glass recycler and a paving stone producer expected to receive more than 10 tonnes of bottles from the hotels each day. These could be used to make about 800 square metres of paving stones.
'In the past, we couldn't afford to recycle bottles on our own,' said Terence Wong Chi-ho, of Laputa Eco-Construction Material.
