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SCMP Series
China’s recycling revolution
4 of 4
1
China's recycling revolution 01: How the National Sword policy caused global disruption
Plastic waste outside an illegal recycling factory in Jenjarom, Kuala Langat, Malaysia. Photo: Reuters
2
China's recycling revolution 02: Shanghai asks ‘What trash are you?’
A child puts plastic delivery bags into a recycling bin. Photo: EPA
3
China’s recycling revolution 03: Hong Kong and Taiwan - one trash can, two systems
Granny Lee, a cardboard granny pictured at North Point. Photo: Dickson Lee
4
China’s recycling revolution 04: confronting the global plastic crisis
Plastic waste at HKTDC Food Expo at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai. Photo: K. Y. Cheng
Plastic waste at HKTDC Food Expo at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai. Photo: K. Y. Cheng
Podcasts

China’s recycling revolution 04: confronting the global plastic crisis

  • A new modern phenomenon is causing a massive increase in single-use plastic packaging, overwhelming any positive effect of bans on plastic straws
  • New plastic technology might be able to join the dots between food disposal and food production
Environment
Jarrod Watt
Jarrod Watt
Why you can trust SCMP
The full extent of the global crisis of plastic in our oceans was revealed in studies by Professor Jenna Jambeck and her team from the University of Georgia. Their calculations that there were five grocery sized bags filled with plastic for every foot of coastline in the world made headlines around the globe.

What are we going to do about all this plastic?

It’s going to take more than just banning the use of plastic drinking straws, and this final episode takes you to meet some people who are actively working on an alternative to single-use plastic which has made modern life so convenient but our environment so polluted.

While you’re consciously saying ‘no’ to straws a very recent modern innovation is creating a tsunami of single-use plastic packaging that’s breaking up on the shores of the US, UK, Australia and mainland China.

You’ll meet people in Hong Kong who are trying to find a solution to the scourge of single-use plastic bottles, either by bringing together massive corporate interests to find a solution or by taking on the big boys with clever design and the hope that people can be convinced to once again drink water from a tap instead of from a vending machine.

We will head back to mainland China to look at the work being done by one of the giants in the global chemical and plastics industry, hoping to bring in an alternative to plastic bags that might just have a bigger impact than removing plastics from landfill.

What if the process of recycling could be tied to food security?

Hong Kong-based ecoprenuer Bobsy Mana talks about his restaurant’s embrace of fully compostable plates, cutlery and packaging, and Richard Brubaker takes us back to Shanghai for an insight into a farming process embraced in ancient Egypt and commercialised in the 1970s which might just be the missing link for China to solve two of its major environmental problems at once.

Sources and credits:

Paul Zimmerman; Drinks Without Waste

Ada Yip; Urban Spring

Susan Strasser; historian

Professor Jonathan Wong; Hong Kong Baptist University

Rowan Williams; BASF

Bobsy Gaia; Mana restaurants

Richard Brubaker; Collective Responsibility

Presenter: Laurie Chen

Voiceovers: Joe Kainz, Bonnie Au

Music credit: Charlie Mgee ‘Plastic’ (music.formidablevegetable.com.au)

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