EPD Waste Reduction Facilities
Strong Connection of Recycling Network
In October of 2020, the Environmental Protection Department (EPD) is subsidized all the community recycling centers such as Recycling Stations, Recycling Stores, and Recycling Spots to update their image and unify the image of all recycling centers in Hong Kong, in order to build a new community recycling network and strengthen the support for waste reduction and recycling at the district level.
EPD also introduced the GREEN$ (Green Coins) smart card to encourage the public to use the community recycling facilities. The integral of GREEN$ can use to exchange the gift items and can be used in all the community recycling facilities, which have a strong linkage with the community recycling network. In addition, it also uniforms all the recycling stations to accept at least eight common types of recyclables and extended the daily service hours, and increased the service days, which make the recycling become more convenient and enhance the recycling incentive to the residents also can strengthen their recycling awareness.
It is a good step to reduce waste and enhance the public’s recycling awareness. But all of those actions are encouraging voluntary measures that depend on the environmental awareness and consciousness of citizens, which much passive and caused the motivation in citizens may not much large. Therefore, EPD should introduce mandatory measures such as legislate for Producer Responsibility to promote the shared responsibility of manufacturers, importers, wholesalers, retailers, and consumers for the recovery, recycling, and disposal of waste products, to achieve the source reduction. Introduce the Municipal Solid Waste Charging Scheme also an important measure to reduce the production of waste by citizens with higher incentives. It is a very effective way to reduce waste from the source.
To achieve a sustainable environment cannot rely on one solution and it should multi-measures parallel at the same time and put much effort to deal with the environmental problem. Sustainability is a long-term process and it is time to take action.
Reference
GREEN @ COMMUNITY (2020). Retrieved from Environmental Protection Department, Hong Kong Waste Reduction Web site: https://www.wastereduction.gov.hk/en/community/crn_intro.htm