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It’s common knowledge to everyone that we produce waste. But how much food waste do we produce in Hong Kong? What I mean by food waste isn’t just the food that you scrape away at the end of a meal, being too full or too dissatisfied with the food to finish it. It’s also the food that restaurant produces and have to throw away at the end of the day, the food that doesn’t fit the standard or food waste created during the cooking progress. Not to mention the food that supermarket disposes of, and they alone contribute 0.9% of the food waste only. Which puts things into prospective if you consider how many supermarkets there are in Hong Kong and how much they are estimated to throw out daily.
You might or might not be shocked to find out that 1/3 of solid waste in Hong Kong are food waste, which amounts to a staggering number of 3,200 tones. For those who can’t picture how much that is, well, it’s the equivalent of 120 double decker buses. And that’s not a monthly or weekly figure, but a daily one. So yes, 3,200 tonnes of food waste are thrown out and dumped in the landfill site very single day.
Where do the food wastes go? You might ask, well, they go to the landfill, of course. But landfills are not unlimited. We only have a certain amount left and statistic shows that the remaining capacities of Hong Kong’s landfill sites, which there are only three, will be exhausted by 2018. So we are only two years off the mark here. That’s not even the bad news – the commercial and industrial food waste have doubled in the recent years, meaning that if the rate continue to grow, we might be out of landfill before we know it.