When details of the scheme were announced in 2017, the government had already been running trials, education campaigns and public consultations, but it wasn’t until 2021, when the scheme was voted into law, that more concrete preparatory work began for its implementation. A six-month phase-in starting in April 2024 was eventually announced but due to public backlash, it was postponed to August before being delayed again to mid-2025. “We need to do more work to look into the real problems of implementation,” Wong says. “Not just worrying about the bag, but also how to put the waste into the bag. What kind of waste goes in there? What about larger items? The government needs to provide clear guidelines on all this.”

This lack of guidelines becomes all the more obvious when it comes to food waste. “Most of the work [preparing the public for the MSW scheme] was done at housing estates, mainly on recycling for plastic and paper but not much for food waste,” the professor says. “When Hong Kong tried to implement the scheme, it was clear the recycling facilities for food waste were not sufficient.” Even if the purple bins launched in 2018 to collect food waste across the city were successful, Wong explains, O-Park 1, the food waste processing facility operating since 2018, can only process 200 tonnes of food waste a day, and the completion of O-Park 2, projected to process an additional 300 tonnes a day, has been delayed. This is far from addressing the 3,300 tonnes a day Hong Kong produces, so we need to focus more on reducing food waste at the source, Wong says.

In Hong Kong, our busy way of life tempts us to favour convenience over sustainability—and nowhere is this more obvious than with our culture of dining out. How can we get out of this cycle?

Thankfully, local groups like Green Hospitality have been educating businesses to do so. Founded by Lucia Loposova in 2018, the non-profit focuses on helping restaurants and hotels achieve their sustainability goals—with food waste being a big focus. “We work predominantly with businesses because we want to work around their business model and practices,” she says. “If they serve so many customers, then they can actually start the change rather than wait for the customer to change themselves.”

In 2022, as part of the MSW scheme’s trial, Green Hospitality worked with 20 Hong Kong restaurants over three months to help them implement better waste management practices. The group collected data on the types and quantity of waste produced. “We used this data to give them input on how they can reduce their waste,” she says. “Some of the restaurants were really good at reducing their waste, [with] some actually reaching a 90 per cent recycling rate.”

Loposova explains that it often doesn’t take much to repurpose food. “For instance, you can further ferment used tea leaves and create lahpet thoke or fermented tea leaf salad, which is very popular in Myanmar.” Fruit and vegetable trimmings can be turned into broths, nitrogen-rich coffee grounds can be composted or used to neutralise odours and oyster shells can be milled into a calcium-rich animal feed. Following the success of its MSW scheme study, Green Hospitality continued holding workshops where restaurant owners and chefs could learn ways to reduce food waste.

The Sustainable Restaurant Association (SRA), which was founded in the UK and launched in Hong Kong in 2019, is also working to educate restaurants using Food Made Good, its sustainability accreditation framework. Food waste is just one of the many pillars the SRA considers when certifying restaurants on their sustainability practices. “We don’t want zero waste restaurants [if that comes at] the detriment of the treatment of their staff, for example,” says Juliane Caillouette Noble, managing director at the SRA. “We really think that each pillar of our framework is interlinked.” The accreditation process involves an in-depth questionnaire restaurants fill out, evidence submission to back their claims and visits conducted by the SRA to provide assistance and clarification. “It’s built to talk directly to restaurants,” she says. “They shouldn’t need a sustainability consultant. The questionnaire should guide you towards how to tackle sustainability.”

In relation to food waste, she explains that different types of restaurants face different challenges. “Fast food restaurants tend to have fairly low waste in the kitchen but fairly high waste on the plate—people are more likely to waste cheap food,” she says. “They’ve essentially pushed food waste out to the suppliers because they are buying pre-prepped, pre-cut food.” On the other hand, in fine dining restaurants, most of the food prep happens in the kitchen—which can produce lots of waste, as unwanted parts of ingredients are discarded—and consumers don’t tend to waste the expensive food on
their plate.

The Food Made Good label recognises that each restaurant is at a different stage of its sustainability journey, so there isn’t necessarily a set standard for all. “A restaurant that we would say has excellent food waste practice is one that has a policy, trains [its] staff, monitors and measures, takes actions to reduce and mitigate, then uses all the surplus that [it has] and [has a plan] for anything that’s leftover after all this,” says Caillouette Noble.

Loposova says that restaurants can also set more sustainable expectations for consumers. “I think that [consumers] have shaped restaurants to be robots following recipes, but there needs to be relative flexibility,” she says. “We need to educate both the consumer and the restaurant to arrive at a point where the consumer isn’t too upset for not having their favourite dish on the menu because a storm caused a bad harvest.”

Wong says: “In the past and now too, it’s very much part of Chinese culture to treat friends lavishly when they come over for dinner,” he says. “There are also lots of banquets where people can’t finish all the food—so yes, a culture change is needed so we can reduce the amount of food we make and the waste we generate.”

At the forefront of shaping tomorrow’s culture with innovative ideas are Hong Kong’s youth. One start-up that looks at changing people’s perspectives on food waste is Chomp. Founded in mid-2021 by Carla Martinesi, Chomp is an app that lists discounted unsold food surplus from businesses such as bakeries and restaurants. Martinesi often struggles with having to explain what counts as food waste to restaurants: “People understand that discounted grocery products are not perfect and maybe they have to use it quickly, but for restaurants, it’s more difficult to explain this concept.”

Yet she is hopeful and committed to educating the public about it. Chomp holds educational talks, cooking workshops and even dinners where delicious fine dining dishes are made from food scraps to showcase what’s possible. “A lot of [farms in Hong Kong] are struggling to sell their products because a lot of people don’t know this exists,” says Martinesi. “Many don’t understand that food from Hong Kong can be good, or that it can be a more ethical and sustainable choice to have something that’s local—so part of our education explains all this and we also do food tastings as part of it.”

Until Hong Kong properly implements the MSW charging scheme with clear guidelines, managing food waste will remain in the hands of the public. To redirect the course of this crisis, restaurants in the city can play their part in getting better at sorting their waste—which could prove to be a lucrative endeavour—and be creative and flexible with their menus to educate consumers on more sustainable eating habits. It requires a shift in how we view food and food waste—or, as Loposova puts it: “More awareness needs to be built around how much waste we generate and we also need to make sure people don’t see food as something cheap and disposable.”

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