Food Waste Reduction

Hong Kong government’s food waste policies not effective Source reduction, treatment of food waste in community needed to be strengthened 21st October, 2009
The Greeners Action has been pushing forward the “Food Wise Campaign” since 2007, from cooperating with shopping malls to hold “less rice to $1 discount” to the launching of “Food Wise days” nowadays which gain support and participation of near 170 caterings. The aim is to raise public awareness of addressing food waste problem and to rebuild “Food Wise” habit, instilling our community a cherishing value to food resource.

Chief Executive CY Leung on past week announced in the policy address that the government, for the first time, rolled out solutions in response to the yearly upward trend of amount of food waste produced in the territory (For details, please refer to appendix1). It is going to build in phase an organic resource recovery centre in Siu Ho Wan to handle food waste by turning them to compost and biogas. However, the time of completion of the facility has been delayed by 2 years than scheduled to 2015. Also, it only deals with 200 tonnes of food waste from industrial and commercial sectors, comprising as small as 6% of total 3,310 tonnes of food waste in Hong Kong. It is definitely not sufficient. At the same time, 70% of total food waste from households has not been dealt with by the facility, showing the lack of the government’s determination in resolving the growing food waste problem.