Valorisation of Food Waste in Hong Kong for the Sustainable Production of Chemicals and Materials

Food waste, one of the largest potions of municipal solid waste, is a global problem. Every year nearly 1.3 billion tons of food trash are dumped in landfills and otherwise wasted around the world. As the world’s most densely populated metropolis, the food waste issue in Hong Kong is more severe than other Asian developed jurisdictions such as Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. In Hong Kong, where people love to eat out, leftover food takes up much of the limited space in city landfills. The amount of food discarded by the hospitality industry has more than doubled in the past five years and about a third of more than nine-thousand tons of solid waste dumped in the city’s landfills each day is leftover food! It is most likely that the existing landfills in Hong Kong will be full before 2020 according to local Waste Disposal Plan [1]. Severe environmental problems could be caused as well.