The Green Earth calls for more composting capacity
The founder of environmental group The Green Earth, Edwin Lau, has welcomed the government's plan to have a food waste recycling bin for each and every public housing block within two years but he says there is still room to expand the composting of waste once it is collected.  Speaking on RTHK's Hong Kong Today programme, Lau said government data from 2022 pointed to Hong Kong's daily food waste disposal at being over 3,300 metric tonnes but that current composting capacity was less than 20 percent of that. "You need to match both the total amount of food waste collected from the housing estates and also, at the back end, all the facilities or the food waste composting system," he said Lau said the Organic Resources Recovery Centre at Siu Ho Wan in North Lantau, known as O-Park 1, was currently up and running and that O-Park 2 at Sha Ling in North District was undergoing trial runs before being operational later this year. "These two added together will be 500 tonnes of food waste capacity per day. And, besides these two, there are two sewage co-digestion plants operating, that all together total 100 tonnes per day capacity. So you add up all these four facilities and there is a maximum of 600 tonnes," he said.  Lau said he thought the government had most likely done the calculation to match the front-end and the back-end to prevent any kind of bottle-neck from happening. Currently, around 90 percent of public estates share some 700 smart recycling bins, and every estate will have at least one bin by next month.  Environment minister Tse Chin-wan told lawmakers on Wednesday that the plan was to match the number of blocks with the same amount of bins within two years. Tse added that more than 400 smart recycling bins for food waste would be put into service at private housing estates in this financial year and that more bins would be added to estates where there was strong demand.