Hong Kong waste recyclers ‘barely holding on’, industry veterans say after policy shelved
- Mil Mill founder and chief executive Harold Yip says fresh postponement of waste-charging scheme a blow to industry
Hong Kong’s only recycler of drinks cartons has at last settled into a new home near the border, eight months after a government-backed landlord told the company to leave its old site in Yuen Long.
Nigel Lo Chi-chung and Harold Yip Man-ki, the founders of Mil Mill, said the enterprise was at one stage in peril because they had failed to secure investors and the government had rejected a bid for financial support.
“At one point, we even tried to imagine how Mil Mill could continue to operate without a site,” said Lo, the pulp plant’s operations director. “The government offered no funding, no help.”
But now, after the termination of the lease with Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks last September, they have moved operations to a new site in Ping Che, near the border with mainland China.
Insiders in the recycling industry have also said last month’s shelving of a waste-charging scheme has put a damper on business amid Hong Kong’s continued economic woes.
They added they were struggling to survive without government support.
“The recycling sector [in Hong Kong] is highly dependent on external help, such as the government,” Chung Shan-shan, a senior lecturer of biology at Baptist University who specialises in waste management, said.
