ZIM CITY

Small deposits, smart waste reduction

Paul Zimmerman on motivating Hongkongers to recycle plastic drink packaging and other plastics

You don’t need research to understand that a high deposit will help ensure used plastic bottles come back, instead of ending up in the landfill or the environment. What is less well understood is that a dollar or fifty cents deposit could slow down the broader agenda for plastic recycling in Hong Kong.

My slogan in 2017 was ‘a dollar a bottle’. After volunteering my time chairing 97 meetings to lead research, pilot schemes and consultation among participants on Drink Without Waste we learned that we need to start conservatively, as close as possible to the actual value of the plastic bottle. Here is why.

We have highly efficient recycling networks for paper and metal. Consumers, domestic helpers, building managers and cleaners, waste collectors and street cleaning companies, all have people, bins and trucks to keep these separate. Can we motivate them to also handle plastics?

Yes, we can. We have started with plastic bottles, a highly recognisable fraction of our waste which makes up 5 percent of Hong Kong’s plastic waste. With a pilot scheme we are offering 5 cents to cleaners for returning plastic bottles and 3 cents to recyclers for the logistics.

In a few months the scheme has grown to 100 tons of plastic recovered. We see a restart of plastic collection, sorting and recycling in the target areas. The scheme is convincing property owners and managers (including Government departments) to facilitate the bins and sorting space required. It gives us confidence that with modest incentives we can grow a network to recover 70 percent of used plastic bottles and expand it to handle all plastics in the future.

That is less than the cost of schemes proposed by others. To collect bottles and pay out 50 cents or a dollar we would need 4,500 ‘reverse vending machines’ to make sure money is not paid twice. The cost of the machines, maintenance and manpower could add another dollar to the cost of a drink, so two dollars including the deposit. Relying solely on RVMs cannot be the way forward.

Expensive automation to protect against fraud can’t easily be expanded to handle other plastics, nor does Hong Kong have the space to replicate collection systems for different waste streams.

High deposits benefit manufacturers of reverse vending machines. As long as deposits apply equally for all, the drink manufacturers will see little impact on their sales. However, as the consumer ultimately pays the cost, high deposits make it effectively a ‘consumer responsibility scheme’.

I propose we legislate a true ‘Producer Responsibility Scheme’ mandating the percentage of used beverage containers to be collected for drink manufacturers and importers to avoid waste charges. This will motivate them to incentivise Hong Kong’s property managers, cleaning companies and recyclers to create systems for the return, collection, sorting and recycling of plastic drink packaging and other plastics.

Paul Zimmerman is CEO of Designing Hong Kong and Vice-Chairman of the Southern District Council. He has been acting as Chairman of the Single-Use Beverage Packaging Working Group and their ‘Drink Without Waste’ initiative since 2017.