Hongkongers will have to buy government-approved bags, available in nine sizes, for 11 HK cents (1 US cent) for each litre of garbage.

Campaign groups earlier called on authorities to subsidise rubbish bags for disabled people and those with chronic conditions due to their heavy use of disposable medical supplies.

Li said the scheme would put a financial strain on nursing homes due to the variety of waste they produced on a daily basis, such as diapers and medical disposals.

“Those who require diapers need to change six to eight times per day,” she said, adding kitchen waste disposal and some big items also needed to be handled.

“Families of some elderly residents may not come back to collect their belongings after they pass away.

“There are also things like old or soiled mattresses and broken wheelchairs … Our industry actually deals with a massive amount of waste.”

Li said transferring the cost to home residents would be difficult, as 75 per cent of the service users were either low-income or government assistance recipients. She said an extra HK$10 government subsidy offered to needy groups was of little help.

“For someone who needs to get their diapers changed up to eight times a day, can the HK$10 really cover it? I think we can all do the maths.”

Li was pointing to a HK$10 increase in rates provided to those on the government social security assistance and old age allowance, in response to the coming solid waste-charging scheme.

Li later told the Post industry representatives met officials from the Social Welfare Department and Labour and Welfare Bureau on Thursday morning and voiced their concerns.

But she said the officials would simply report the issues back to the government, and they had not scheduled further meetings.

Li expressed concern that officials would not have enough time to formulate new measures and allocate resources to help the industry, and hoped for clear guidelines by April 1.

Cheung Tak-wing, vice-chairman of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Pharmacy, also told the radio show that authorities seemed to be struggling to hammer out final details on the bags’ distribution with shop operators.

He said authorities had initially signed a letter of intent with the chamber to have member pharmacies sell the bags on their behalf, but the agreement fell through following disagreements on discounts.

“Authorities then reached out to some pharmacies individually, and about 50 have agreed to sell the bags for now,” he said, warning some distributors might opt to withdraw since official contracts had not been signed yet.

“We don’t know when we can start selling the bags either. We just learned online that they should be available starting January 26.”

Cheung said that the government had offered a 3 per cent discount to pharmacies.

But if customers used electronic payment platforms, such as Octopus, pharmacies would pay an additional 1.5 per cent handling fee. This would result in profit sharing with the electronic payment platforms and make it harder for pharmacies to operate.

He also said the government had refused to disclose discount rates offered to other retail points over commercial confidentiality reasons.

Meanwhile, Cleaning Workers Union organiser Leung Tsz-yan expressed concern over the lack of clarity of the scheme’s implementation, saying many workers remained unclear about its policies.

She said some cleaners were worried about the possibility of being held legally responsible if they handled trash of people who failed to throw it out in the approved bags.

Additional reporting by Sammy Heung