Hong Kong’s appetite for takeaway meals, already stronger than any other in the region, has doubled from 2019 to 2020. As a result, massive amounts of single-use packaging are sent to the landfill, and many used food containers end up scattered across our hills and in our oceans. The exact scale and nature of this waste management issue is yet to be identified. Moreover, solving this type of challenge requires addressing entire value chains rather than just the packaging itself, and designing and developing system-level solutions is no easy task.
The Eat Without Waste initiative aims to address this complex knowledge gap. Our researchers have established a granular view of Hong Kong’s take-out waste landscape. With this baseline as a starting point, they set out to define the solution space. To this end, our team has embarked on an extensive programme of desk-top research, field work, and interviews with local and international experts and stakeholders. Different solution types are inventoried and assessed for their relative merits against multiple environmental, economic, and social metrics.
