Hong Kong food waste: how it’s being reduced by restaurants, charities and perishable-

food portal

by Bernice Chan
South China Morning Post
Wednesday, 26 April, 2017, 6:46am

Liz Thomas’ friends and family were horrified when she asked restaurant staff to pack up
leftovers to take home. She made them even more uncomfortable when she started bringing
her own containers, but she didn’t care.

“It made me think how casual it is for us to throw away food and so my husband and a friend
started talking about ways to make a difference,” she says.
After nine months sacrificing evenings and weekends to find a solution, they recently
launched Food Savior, an online platform that helps restaurants advertise food that is made
fresh but is not sold the same day and will be thrown out unless someone buys it.
She compares it to an initiative by Marks & Spencer, which discounts expiring food near
closing time. With Food Savior, unused fresh-food portions are available at all times of the
day, because they can be used for breakfast, lunch or dinner.
“It’s been well received so far,” says Thomas, who started by cold calling and e-mailing
restaurants.
Those who understood what Food Saviour was doing immediately jumped on board.
One of the best-sellers so far has been small blocks of gourmet French cheese from
Hollywood Road wine bar La Cabane. Unused fresh food items sell on Food Savior almost as
soon as they are posted.
Thomas knows her grass-roots approach is just scratching the surface, with almost four tonnes
of food waste dumped daily in the city’s landfills, but she hopes buying unused restaurant
food will take off. Charities such as Food Angel and Feeding Hong Kong collect food from
supermarkets, suppliers, hotels, restaurants and bakeries, while a group of restaurants formed
the Zero Waste Alliance to try to decrease wastage. Each member has its own way of dealing
with the problem. When Linguini Fini moved into its premises in Elgin Street, in Hong
Kong’s SoHo dining district, in November 2014, the restaurant bought a composter. It uses
the nutrient-rich fertiliser for its own garden and donates the rest to schools with gardens.
Mana! Fast Slow Food on nearby Wellington Street has the most holistic environmental
message of the group. It serves only organic, plant-based food, uses compostable and
biodegradable packaging, and even pays a truck company to transport organic food waste
several days a week to the New Territories to be composted for farmers to use.
“We’d like to encourage all of Hong Kong to turn food waste into a valuable resource by
composting. For example, if one small vegetarian restaurant is generating 1.5 tonnes of food
scraps and waste every month alone, just imagine how much all of Hong Kong’s estimated
11,000 restaurants are generating,” says owner Bobsy Gaia.
Peggy Chan agrees. The chef-owner of vegetarian restaurant Grassroots Pantry on Hollywood
Road, Sheung Wan, is dismayed at how food waste is dealt with in Hong Kong.
“Why should a stand-alone restaurant have excess food? Charities can’t take most of the food
because of fears of contamination. There are more regulations against companies giving food
away than for me as an individual,” she says. She says the Zero Waste Alliance is working
with Baguio Waste Management and Recycling to collect food scraps for composting, and if
more restaurants in the area are interested, it would be more economically feasible, as there is
no government support for this initiative.
“Recycling [of] food waste is not a habit in Hong Kong. Look at Taiwan and Japan. It’s a
priority for them, but Hong Kong is not there yet,” she says. Chan is careful about how much
food she orders from suppliers. “Chefs are not skilled in that they order too much because
they worry about running out of food,” she says. “That’s old-school thinking. It’s because
there is a lack of communication and the food rots and no one knows.” She and her team try
to streamline orders, and make things in small batches. Even where vegetables are placed in
the refrigerator can affect their shelf life.
“We need to order three to four days in advance, so storage is important. We used to have our
fresh vegetables in the back of the fridge and soon they would get frostbite,” Chan says. “We
now put them closer to the front of the fridge. So far we’ve managed to cut 40 per cent on
food costs even though we have many organic items.”
Practically every part of each vegetable is used, including beetroot ends that are roasted and
put in the gnocchi, she says. Vegetable peel goes into the stock, and even carrot tops are
pickled or stir-fried.
In Macau, Sands China planned waste-management systems at its four properties before they
were constructed. It has at least one compost machine in each of its casino properties to tackle
food waste.
Syed Mubarak, director of sustainability for the Sands group, takes us down to The
Venetian’s car park to see the Eco-Safe Digester. It has its own small shed, it is clean and
doesn’t smell. A tall plastic bin full of vegetable and fruit waste is emptied into the composter
and enzymes and hot water are added. Within 24 hours it becomes waste water, which is then
pumped to the city’s wastewater treatment plant and recycled for use in toilets and gardens.
Mubarak says the latest technology creates water, rather than compost, out of the waste.
Although the “food digester” can process a range of meat, vegetables, bread and even coffee
grounds,
Mubarak says Sands is only focusing on organic food waste from the kitchens. In the past 2½
years, more than 1,000 tonnes of food waste have been diverted from landfills. Nevertheless,
Sands is piloting a composter to process post-consumer waste into fish food or bio fuel.
“We also keep asking event organisers how many people are coming, to overcome supply and
demand mismatch. We have to keep educating the food and beverage team – if they don’t
bring everyone together, it doesn’t work.”
The Eco Food Digester turns food waste into water.Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s Environmental
Protection Department says the government hopes to cut food waste dumped in landfills by 40
per cent by 2022.
It has launched campaigns encouraging customers to order less in restaurants, provided tips
on how to use food trimmings, and recognises hotels and restaurants that cut food waste and
donate leftovers to NGOs.
According to a report, “Monitoring of Solid Waste in Hong Kong – Waste Statistics for
2015”, released last December, food waste in landfills in 2015 was down by 7.1 per cent year-
on-year, though still amounted to 33 per cent of all municipal solid waste. The government
plans to build five or six dedicated recycling plants, with the first one ready for testing in Siu
Ho Wan, North Lantau, in the second quarter of this year. The organic food waste will be
turned into biogas for power generation, and composting, with the aim of diverting about
70,000 tonnes of food waste from landfills each year. The second plant will be in Sha Ling in
North District.
Public relations and advertising students from the Chinese University of Hong Kong recently
made a video to raise awareness of waste in fast food restaurants.
They visited three outlets in Aberdeen, secretly filming as meals went unfinished. They
collected leftovers in a box and asked members of the public to identify the items and guess
the weight.
“We spent less than 15 minutes in each restaurant and we were able to collect a total of 2.7kg
of leftover food,” says Ivie Yeung Suet-lin.
“If we collected so much food in a short period of time in just three restaurants, imagine how
much food waste there would be in the whole of Hong Kong,” she says. “Hongkongers are so
wasteful. They can be impulsive when they want to eat something and then not finish it.”
Yeung says it’s ironic that as children we are taught to finish our food, but ignore this advice
as we get older.
After posting the video on Facebook, people commented that they didn’t realise so much food
got wasted. “Although we did this for a social media campaign competition, we think this is
an important issue and will continue promoting it on our Facebook page,” she says.