Hong Kong’s surprising history of recycling

Reduce, reuse, recycle; across the globe this mantra has become familiar to anyone with even a glimmer of environmental awareness. But how closely followed are these instructions, especially in Hong Kong, where effective recycling processes, rather than feel-good performative gestures, are easier said than done? In the absence of incentives, whether financial inducement for compliance or penalties for non-participation, such recycling bins are evidently used by those who recognise that their lives are significantly overpackaged and environmentally unsustainable. But only a few metres away, everything else, from drink cans to banana peels and glass bottles, is bundled into plastic bags by everyone else and flung onto the stinking midden, to await collection and landfill disposal.

With unthinking irony, the plastic bags used to contain such domestic refuse are almost the only items actually recycled..