Hong Kong's recycling firms struggle with the plastic peril
Hong Kong produces mountains of plastic waste, so why are our recycling plants struggling to stay open?
Plastic, plastic everywhere, and all with nowhere to go: the bales of flattened drinks bottles, clothes hangers and other discarded items piling up at Lee Hing-tak's sprawling recycling plant in Tuen Mun Eco Park epitomise the deep dysfunction in the city's plastics recycling system.
For one thing, little recycling is actually conducted in Hong Kong aside from a few operators like Lee, who runs Telford Envirotech. Most of the purportedly recycled plastic waste is gathered by scrap collectors who bundle it for export to mainland processing plants.
[Recycling is] nothing more than waste smuggling to the mainland
Of the 843,200 tonnes of plastic waste recovered in 2011, as much as 839,300 tonnes - 99.5 per cent - was exported. Just 0.5 per cent was recycled locally, according to the Environmental Protection Department.
Although mainland regulations stipulate that only processed plastic waste can be imported, this wasn't strictly enforced. So traders have simply gathered the unsorted plastic into bales, declared it processed and sent it across the border, where the material can sell for about HK$2,000 per tonne.
For the most part, Hong Kong's plastic recycling business is "nothing more than waste smuggling to the mainland", Lee says.
Those operations came to an abrupt halt in March when the Chinese customs officials launched Operation Green Fence. Scheduled to run until November, the campaign aims to crack down on waste smuggling. Since then, more than 100,000 tonnes of plastic waste intended for the mainland has piled up at various New Territories collection points, the Recycle Materials and Re-production Business General Association estimates.