“I thought, can we produce a battery that is not polluting, and recycle it when it is depleted, in a non-polluting way too?”

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So far there have been few clean solutions to handling these batteries, apart from burning or dissolving them or reusing them for diminished energy storage devices.

But Wong says dead lithium-ion batteries are worth their weight in gold, because they contain valuable metals and raw materials.

In 2014 he founded a start-up, GRST, with his younger brother Tony Wong Sing-ming and a team of scientists and engineers.

They claim to have developed the first genuinely green process to recycle and remanufacture lithium-ion batteries and hope to promote the technology as Hong Kong’s own.

Working out of a small factory in Shunde, Guangdong province, the brothers aim to do some of the recycling and production in Hong Kong, given the sheer supply of battery waste readily available and the government’s ongoing efforts to bring back industry.

“What we are trying to introduce is a total solution and circular economy,” he said. “It is entirely possible to start an experimental production platform in Hong Kong – made in Hong Kong, recycled in Hong Kong and reproduced in Hong Kong.”

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The brothers are among several industrialists and entrepreneurs beginning to see potential in moving back, or setting up new production lines in the city, which lost its industrial base 30 years ago.

It was in 2016 that the Hong Kong government began championing re-industrialisation based on high-end manufacturing using new technologies and smart production.

In the past couple of years, it has dished out billions of dollars in funding for new advanced manufacturing facilities and data hubs. The government’s Innovation and Technology Fund has given financial support for projects focused on upgrading manufacturing technology, and a subsidised re-industrialisation training programme for staff of local enterprises.

Last year, Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor announced a HK$2 billion (US$255 million) Re-industrialisation Funding Scheme to subsidise manufacturers who set up smart production lines in Hong Kong.

Now the city’s dire waste woes are moving entrepreneurs like the Wongs to act.

In 2017, Hong Kong sent 3.92 million tonnes of municipal solid waste to landfill, or 10,733 tonnes every day, one of the highest rates of disposal per capita among developed Asian cities. All this time, most of the waste has ended up in the city’s overflowing tips, or exported to mainland China or Southeast Asia for recycling or dumping.

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But mainland China began tightening waste imports in 2017 and Beijing is mulling plans to ban all solid waste imports from as early as 2020.

This is already affecting Hong Kong recycling firms, many of which claim they made a loss last year as they struggled to find alternatives to sending waste to China.

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What is also emerging, however, is a growing appreciation for circular economics – the limiting of waste and pollution by keeping resources in use as long as possible by recycling them into new products or materials.

“There is money to be made from waste. It might be tough at the start but, at least from a recycling standpoint, I am optimistic about the prospects for re-industrialisation,” said Jacky Lau Yiu-shing, director of the Hong Kong Recycle Materials and Reproduction Business General Association.

Apart from batteries, investments are being made to recycle drinks cartons, plastics and textiles.

Unlike plastic and paper, there has never been any cost-effective way of recycling drinks cartons, which are made from a mix of paper, plastic and metal. But this is changing.

Harold Yip, executive director of Secure Information Disposal Services, obtained financing last year from the government’s Recycling Fund to set up a 20,000 sq ft drinks carton recycling factory at the Science Park’s Yuen Long Industrial Estate, and it will begin churning out exportable paper pulp next year. It will be Hong Kong’s first large-scale facility.

“We have to handle our own rubbish now,” he says. “In Hong Kong, it’s not that people don’t want to pay to have their waste recycled, but you need to give them the trust that the waste is being handled properly and the material will end up turned into something useful.”

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He believes his factory will show how discarded drinks cartons can be turned into a valuable raw material to be used in the manufacture of napkins and paper towels, among other things.

Production is expected to begin in the middle of this year, initially handling two tonnes of drinks carton waste per day from schools, or possibly the Environmental Protection Department’s network of Community Green Stations where people deposit their recyclable waste.

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Last year, spinning mill Novetex and the publicly funded Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel opened Hong Kong’s first spinning mill in 50 years, to turn unwanted garments into recycled yarn fibre that can be used to make new clothes.

Edwin Keh Yee-man, the institute’s chief executive officer, says Hong Kong’s economy is too concentrated in the service industry and re-industrialisation is a move in the right direction.

But, for recyclers looking longer-term, the availability of land to expand is an issue.

There is still space in places such as the EcoPark in Tuen Mun, an industrial estate used exclusively for waste recycling and environmental engineering, but it is filling up.

The Hong Kong Science Park operates a 67-hectare site in Yuen Long’s industrial estate, but it hardly provides the space needed for economies of scale.

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The next big supply of industrial space, a 1.1 million sq ft Advanced Manufacturing Centre in Tseung Kwan O, is slated to open in 2021, but demand is already expected to outstrip supply.

Lau says large unused spaces such as restored landfills could also be looked at to provide the needed space for those who want to remain in Hong Kong.

Drinks carton recycler Yip says the ideal model for his plant would be to partner with paper factories in mainland China, where new products can be manufactured, including for the Hong Kong market.

As new centre faces overcrowding, is there space for Hong Kong innovation?

For now, his Yuen Long premises will do. But he knows the space crunch means there is a limit to growing the enterprise in Hong Kong, despite the large supply of carton waste readily available.

Similarly, the Novetex mill in the Tai Po industrial estate now uses three tonnes of textile waste daily, a tiny fraction of about 340 tonnes produced every day in the city. To raise its daily input to 10 tonnes, it will have to double the space at the plant.

While most of the recycled yarn is exported to textile and clothes manufacturers overseas, Keh hopes that finished products will one day be made in the city as well.

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“The Made in Hong Kong brand still carries a lot of value,” he said.

Others are more sanguine.

“Waste facilities do not have to be huge,” said Nigel Mattravers, director and general manager of Alba Integrated Waste Solutions.

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The company is pursuing a private joint venture with Swire Beverages and Baguio Waste Management to build the city’s first dedicated recycling facility for polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastics – mostly drinks bottles – and high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic, the type used in shampoo bottles.

Aimed for completion in 2020, the entire facility, packed into a 6,000 square metre plot in the EcoPark, will be able to handle the entire domestic volume of PET and HDPE waste in Hong Kong in the “foreseeable future”.

“People worry that it always has to be some huge incinerator on some outlying island, but it doesn’t because we can be clever,” Mattravers said. “It is possible to build compact facilities.”

Mattravers said the plastic recycled could be supplied to the domestic bottling industry, “closing the loop” in the circular economy.

“This is manufacturing,” he said. “This is a business opportunity, not just a waste opportunity.”

Tony Wong of GRST concurs. Its patented water-based recycling and manufacturing technology needs limited space and minimal manpower, thanks to automation and artificial intelligence.

“We don’t need a large scale to manufacture and recycle,” he said. “We’re not building cars.”

Its process involves discharging the old batteries in a water bath before disassembling them. Valuable lithium salts are extracted using a distillation process, while the battery cells are ground and dissolved in water.

The metals are then extracted magnetically from the plastic, and the recovered materials are mixed into a slurry paste, coated, dried, reprocessed into new electrodes and, finally, brand new batteries.

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Apart from financial support, Tony Wong says it would be good to have policies that help drive the circular economy. Tax concessions could be considered for locally upcycled products made using clean processes, for example.

Referring to the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA) free trade agreement between Hong Kong and mainland China, he said: “Perhaps green batteries exported to China can be duty-free under CEPA? Currently they are not.”

His brother Eric says: “Everyone knows batteries are polluting and everyone knows they can’t be recycled. But there is finally a solution, and it is here in Hong Kong.”

In the drive toward re-industrialisation, he adds, Hong Kong must identify something that can make it stand out. The circular economy might be just that.