MARCH 10, 2000 VOL. 26 NO. 9

Chew On It
Biodegradable fast-food containers and other ideas that can make a difference
By MARIA CHENG Hong Kong

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Hong Kong trashes one million of them every day. The mainland, with almost 200 times the number of people, uses 27 million daily. Plastic-foam food containers, that is. Those ubiquitous bowls and lunchboxes litter cities from Bangkok to Beijing as well as many of the beaches, railway tracks and towns in between. Not a few budget eateries in the SAR serve sit-down meals in throwaway plates rather than employ a dishwasher. Can consumers be weaned off such products? An award-winning Hong Kong company has an alternative: biodegradable tableware.

Join-in Green Products began life as a packaging-materials business. "We noticed an excess of disposable lunch boxes being thrown out every day, and thought that Hong Kong could use something else," explains sales manager Iris Han. The result was a range of containers that earned the company a gold prize at Hong Kong's first Eco-Products Award last year.

"The environment in the city has become so removed from nature that natural cycles of production and consumption don't seem to be important," says Philine Bracht, a design lecturer who was on the judges' panel. Join-in's products could change that. Made from a composite of grass and sugar-cane pulp, the utensils are entirely natural. The technology originated in China, which developed disposable containers made from potatoes over a decade ago. Join-In Green took the innovation a step further by utilizing the strong fibers of grass and sugar cane.

Its fast-food containers also score points for flexibility. "You can get as creative as you want with the material," says Andrew Thomson of a consultancy, the Center of Environmental Technology. Grass pulp, he says, can be used for everything from packing material to animal feed. Even better, the tableware decomposes in less than three months compared to years for styrofoam. The products may be based on a "relatively simple" concept, Thomson says, "but their use and disposal have been realistically thought through."

The local preoccupation with short-term payoffs has made Join-in's containers a rather tough sell. So far, few Hong Kongers are prepared to fork out roughly four times what they would pay for plastic foam. (The company's products - lunchboxes cost about 2.6 cents each - are marketed in Japan as well as the SAR.) "People don't usually consider the impact of what they're using," Han says. "As long as it's cheap and available, they don't care."

Bracht believes government and industry initiatives are needed to counter the lack of eco-awareness. But where plastic-foam restrictions are concerned, the SAR lags behind even China. Troubled by rising "white pollution," which is increasing 6% annually, Beijing this year implemented a nationwide program to eliminate plastic-foam food containers (already outlawed in some cities). Hong Kong has no such agenda. Little wonder, then, that food chains like McDonald's are still using plastic foam in the SAR when its outlets elsewhere have long switched to greener packaging.

Of course, replacing one disposable product with another less-polluting one is not the solution, says Ellen Chan, who is helping to develop guidelines for such containers. "People think going for environmentally friendly products will solve everything. But that's not true. It's a waste problem," she says. Encouraging single-use products ultimately constrains environmental progress. What Hong Kong needs is a fundamental shift from its throwaway culture. Still, a green lunchbox is an improvement.

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