Beyond a plastic ban, Hong Kong should take an ‘earthshot’ at zero waste

True creativity involves considering the entire life cycle when designing products, ensuring all that remains after use are ‘nutrients’, either for nature or other products
But this requires the government to educate, invest and work with manufacturers

Dennis Lee

Published: 9:30am, 16 Nov 2023

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Hong Kong’s plastic ban from next year is a statement of the city’s seriousness about building a responsible and forward-thinking society.

From Earth Day on April 22, the sale and free distribution of disposable plastic will be banned, including dine-in styrofoam and plastic tableware, umbrella bags, and hotel bottled water and toiletries. A second phase in 2025 will extend the ban to takeaway containers, table covers and even dental floss with plastic handles.

The decision comes after it emerged that an estimated 60 tonnes of used rapid antigen test kits went into Hong Kong’s landfills every day during the Covid-19 pandemic, completely sidelining the city’s anti-plastic initiatives – not to mention the surge in plastic use with the increase in food takeaways and deliveries.

How much impact would the citywide plastic ban have? With plastic accounting for 21 per cent of the municipal waste going into landfills, the ban could cut such waste by more than 2,300 tonnes a day. And not just any waste, but toxic, non-degradable waste. This is a step in the right direction. But we should go further. How about if we rethink the meaning of waste?

In 2002, German chemist Michael Braungart and US architect William McDonough published the book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things to push for the regenerative use of commercial products and the end of waste.

This is opposed to the “cradle to grave” consumption model where resources are extracted from nature to make products that end up being thrown away, their graveyard an incinerator and/or landfill. Rather, it is about making products that can ultimately return to nature as nutrients.

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Instead of pointing the finger at consumers, Braungart and McDonough reduced the sustainability issue to a problem of design. True creativity is designing products that consider the entire life cycle, ensuring that, after use, all that remains are “nutrients”, either for nature or other products.

Using this idea, no waste is produced. From architects to contractors, industrial designers to product manufacturers, we need to design and manufacture with regeneration in mind – while educating our children that this is the only way to achieve true sustainability. This is our generation’s “earthshot” challenge.

That’s easier said than done, however, which is why, more than 20 years after Cradle to Cradle, we still rarely see truly recycled products on the market. There are many challenges and this is where the government can step in and push for that giant leap.

We should start with education – because a blind belief in superficial environmental approaches could be worse than doing nothing at all.

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First, we should stop sending the wrong message that we are doing our part for sustainability by recycling anything from plastic bottles to electronic equipment. Most of this recycling is in fact “downcycling”. This means the product ends up being of reduced quality, and often needs more chemicals to make it useful again.

A plastic bottle may be recycled for reuse but, if the process requires breaking the first bottle down in a chemical process to make up a new bottle, then the energy incurred means this is not true recycling. We need to face the fact that the best we are doing is mostly downcycling.

Second, we need to stop false claims about “upcycling”, which is where a product material’s new life contains more “value” than the original. This phenomenon simply does not exist with industrial manufactured products. The only upcycling is in nature, where the seed we plant grows into a whole new product – upcycling has existed in nature since before humanity, and nothing we can come up with industrially can replace it.

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Third, we should invest in our education institutions, from tertiary to postgraduate, to encourage research and development in cyclical and regenerative design, from resource mining to manufacturing, packaging to logistics, and distribution to retrieval, to fully understand the ecosystem of any commercial consumable. Only with such understanding will we be able to redefine our design objectives.

Better reuse of downcycled materials is highly relevant to the construction industry, where often, the quality of the downcycled material has deteriorated so much as to serve little meaningful purpose. Yet these materials can be remade into standard and unitised construction material.

Some examples include carpet tiles made of nylon and polyester fibre, terrazzo composites of marble, granite and glass, or particle boards made from wood shavings and resin.

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The Buildings Department could help by accepting and legitimising innovative downcycled building materials that are proven to be safe and durable, with good insulation value and structural integrity, while not leaving owners and developers to foot the entire cost of testing and accreditation.

There is nothing convenient about leaping towards an “earthshot”. Convenience involves thinking when we buy a bottled drink from the corner shop and throw the empty bottle away afterwards. Being responsible is a matter of habit, and habits can be changed.

For example, the city launched a “Keep Hong Kong Clean” campaign in the 1970s and, within a generation, most of our streets and public transport became practically free of rubbish and graffiti.

If, beyond the plastic ban, we take progressive steps towards a cyclical design society and launch regenerative commercial products and buildings, we would be crafting a truly sustainable Hong Kong story, whose merits speak for themselves.

Dennis Lee is a Hong Kong-born, America-licensed architect with years of design experience in the US and China