Beyond the Bin: Rethinking Waste in Hong Kong

Recycling and food waste sound like solved problems, until you see the gap between what we think happens and what actually does. Hosted by the HKU Jockey Club Enterprise Sustainability Global Research Institute, this 75-minute workshop brings leading organisations across two focused conversations to make the chain visible from the inside.

Rethinking Recycling: Reward and Recover, explores what it actually takes for a bottle in a recycling bin to come back as a new bottle — from the consumer-facing incentives that get it there to the industrial processing that makes bottle-to-bottle recycling possible.

Rethinking Food Waste: Prevent and Reshape, examines where food surplus forms across the food system — from retail operations to the shifting patterns of how Hong Kong orders, prepares, and consumes food.

Expect to walk away knowing things most people in Hong Kong don’t — straight from the operators making it happen.

Session Learnings:

• Understand how Hong Kong’s recycling chain actually functions, and where the friction lies between consumer behaviour, collection, and industrial-scale processing.
• Learn what food-grade PET recycling specifically demands of every upstream player, and what ordinary residents don’t realise about how their own recycling habits decide whether a bottle becomes a new bottle or fails.
• Have a clearer picture of where consumer-facing schemes meet the operational realities of the recycling industry, what each side enables, what each side requires, and where the trade-offs sit.
• Gain a practical view of where food surplus forms in retail operations, and how shifting demand patterns, including the rise of food delivery, reshape preparation and packaging across the food chain.

Post-Event Actions:

• Apply immediately actionable changes to their own household, organisational, or supply chain recycling practices.
• Explore potential partnerships or commercial engagement with the featured organisations across the recycling and food waste reduction value chains.
• Continue the cross-sector dialogue through follow-on engagement with the host organization and the wider research community working at the intersection of NGO practice, social enterprise, and corporate sustainability.
• Share session insights within their own networks to support the shift from sustainability ambition toward coordinated, on-the-ground action.