Opinion | How can Hongkongers pay less in waste charges? Just recycle
- The whole point of the waste-charging scheme is to get people to reduce waste at source
- Ahead of the scheme’s launch, residents could do a trash audit to understand how much they can save on prepaid garbage bags if they recycle
Will the waste-charging scheme be postponed for the third time?
By definition, a trial period is meant to demonstrate how things can work. The government is trying to show the community how the waste-charging scheme will work in settings ranging from housing estates and shopping centres to care homes.
We should not misread the government’s intentions and underestimate its commitment to implementing the scheme in full on August 1. As lessons are learned and data is shared from the trial period, it should be possible to launch the scheme efficiently and effectively in the community at large.
There have also been suggestions that if the trial hits a rough patch, the government should reconsider the plan to launch the waste-charging scheme in August, and perhaps put it off until the city has adequate recycling facilities.
But the fact of the matter is that we may not see a perfect recycling system in Hong Kong for another decade. Consider how the recycling system has interacted with recycling behaviour in places that already implement waste-charging. In South Korea, where prepaid garbage bags were adopted across the country in 1995, the economic benefits gained by the recycling industry grew from HK$1.7 billion in 2001 to HK$7 billion in 2009.
