They should do that with Plastic bottles 1st. The amount of plastic bottles washing up on beaches is CRAZY.
will this create a market for actual glass recycling? granted, once i drop something into the recycle bin its fate becomes a mystery, but at least with plastic, paper, and metal i've got lots of options. glass recycling is a challenge, i only know of a few places that take it (and i have my doubts that it even gets recycled once i drop it off)
cue the old ladies going through the rubbish bins...
Tuen Mun has a company that makes concrete block (called eco-blocks or something like ) using recycled glass to replace sand, but the supply in HK is many times more than their demand. We don't have any glass manufacturing, so i guess someone will have to ship it to mainland.
Last edited by JAherbert; 27-05-2016 at 03:03 PM.
Incase no one clicks on the link ... some issues are disucssed in the article.
Not sure what the diff is between tax and levy.
Most lawmakers backed the new levy, but five voted against it. One of them was catering representative Tommy Cheung.
He said a new levy doesn't necessarily help reduce waste and the government is only paying lip-service to demands by environmentalists. He said the government should instead introduce a tax on glass bottle if it really wants to reduce the number of them.
But Cheung said that his opposition to the bill didn’t mean he was against environmental protection.
His fellow Liberal Party lawmaker Vincent Fang also criticised the new levy, saying the government failed to give any undertaking. He said the government was willing to earmark HK$550 million to build a recycling facility for electronic appliances in March, but it failed to give any such support this time.
He said the glass bottle recycling scheme is doomed to fail because of the lack of government supporting measures and incentives to manufactures and distributors.
Civic Party lawmaker Kwok Ka-Ki, who supported the bill, said he was afraid glass bottles will still end up in landfills despite the levy.
The government suggested that levy collected will be used to hire a licensed contractor and set up a glass-waste recovery network to handle the collection of bottles.
If the government really wanted to encourage the recycling of glass, it could set up bottle banks about the city that pay, oh I don't know... say 50c a bottle to the bottle returner.
This is such a stupid way to do it. Why not just put a deposit on bottles (glass and plastic) so that they get returned for recycling rather than thrown away (or just thrown anywhere which is what seems to happen to a vast number of them!). Its the CONSUMER behaviour we have to change, not manufacturers ffs.