Forty-nine million used bottles collected!
In 2020, We secured $5.6 million funding from Recycling Fund to carry out an Industry Support Programme “A pilot scheme on establishment of a single-use plastic beverage bottle recycling network” (ISP-1920-16-007), also named Neighbourhood Bottle Reward Scheme.
The scheme aims to identify and develop viable collection pathways for beverage bottles in Hong Kong, thus to deliver insights on collector motivations, collection logistics and workable administrative arrangements to provide policy recommendations for future Producer Responsibility Scheme (PRS) on single-use beverage packaging.
53 recyclers, i.e. corner shops and mobile recycling trucks, joined our scheme with the role of purchasing plastic beverage bottles from informal collectors with our designated 5 cents price.
The collected plastic beverage bottles will then be sent to 4 vetted plastic processing plants (processors) for turning into secondary raw materials.
The original 12 month collection period was shortened to 11 months due to overwhelming success that the budget for remuneration ran out earlier. Over the 11 months, 1,245 tonnes of plastic bottles (est 49.8 million pcs bottles) were collected. That is 149% of our original 500 tonne target set in the beginning. A 5 cents reward proved to be sufficient in activating the existing recycling network to collect large volumes of plastic bottles under our scheme!
