Culture
Can Hong Kong Solve its Garbage Crisis?
The cramped city-state is only years away from running out of landfill space.
Hong Kong has a trash problem. With more than 7 million people and limited available land, the city-state is one of the world’s most densely populated urban areas. But the same geographical constraints that have made Hong Kong so compact make it difficult to dispose of the mountains of trash it creates every day. The city’s three landfills are expected to reach capacity by the mid to late 2010s.
The government saw this coming. Hong Kong was a veritable pioneer in pursuing aggressive recycling policies, going as far back to the 1980s. And to a large extent, it’s worked. Between 2005 and 2010, Hong Kong’s domestic recycling rate leaped from 16 percent to 40 percent. That puts it way ahead of New York and London.