Hong Kong's Glass Recycling System
Almost a year after the launch of the SoHo glass recycling campaign, Penny Zhou re-examines our city’s slowly improving yet still massively unsatisfactory glass recycling situation, and takes a closer look at why Hong Kong remains so far behind.
When you first meet April Lai, it is hard to imagine that this petite woman, standing at barely 5’1”, is responsible for collecting tons of waste glass from SoHo and Wan Chai every week. On Thursdays and Saturdays, Lai and a few volunteers brave the early hours and changeable weather to collect glass and arrange transportation to bring it up to the New Territories for recycling. It’s back-breaking work, but Lai and her team have been doing it for almost a year; and in August, they even stepped up their efforts by adding another glass collection day on Mondays.
On each collection day, Lai and her cohorts first hit SoHo, whose first-ever glass-recycling campaign is still gaining strength after kicking off in mid-September last year. Then they move on to the trickier Wan Chai district, whose own campaign was actually set up prior to SoHo’s but proved to be much less organized. There, due to many bars’ lack of willingness and commitment to glass recycling, the collectors have to spend extra hours rummaging through the filth outside the Luard Road Refuse Collection Point (RCP)—first opening up the trash bags and hand-picking the beer bottles, wine bottles and broken pieces of glass from the general garbage, then separating them into the glass recycling bins. Each bin can hold about 600 glass bottles, and during each trip, Lai and co. fill 13 such bins. The combined weight of nearly 8,000 bottles is around three tons, which exceeds what the 2.4-ton truck is designed to carry, but Lai wants to get the maximum use out of each load. Four times a week, the truckers take the glass to Tiostone Environmental Ltd., a factory located in Tuen Mun that makes eco-friendly bricks from the glass.
A happy ending, isn’t it? But unfortunately, this is just a fraction of Hong Kong’s waste glass. Every day, Hongkongers produce some 374 tons of waste glass, and just 3 percent of it gets recycled. The remainder ends up in the city’s three landfills, which are predicted to reach capacity in 2014, 2016 and 2018, respectively.
Collection bins outside RCP / A waste glass truck
A Legacy of Waste
Glass recycling in Hong Kong has not always been such a big problem. Back in the old days, deposit-and-return systems for glass bottles were widely employed, under which you could bring back empty glass bottles from the place you purchased them and receive a bit of money back. By recovering and then re-filling the bottles, this scheme proved to be tremendously helpful, but it was regrettably one that fell out of use over the years due to the large-scale transition undergone by beverage containers from mainly glass to a mixture of glass, paper, plastic and aluminum. With the number of pure glass bottles significantly decreased, the deposit-and-return practice became less cost-effective for grocery stores and the like to maintain. On the other hand, for local glass manufacturers, which are able to process large quantities of waste glass but require a lot of space and need to keep their melting batches at 1,700 degrees Celsius 24-7, the business got too energy-consuming and expensive to be sustainable. By the late 60s, Hong Kong’s glass manufacturing industry basically ceased to exist.