To Hong Kong now where some residents are doing their bit to save the environment, as food delivery and takeouts in the pandemic has brought a surge in plastic waste. Experts are also calling for subsidies for environmentally friendly packaging. Anne Cheng reports.

The rain didn't stop the residents of Hong Kong's Discovery Bay from showing up here. It's a monthly community event hosted by DB Green, where plastics like food and drink cartons, coffee cups and lids, and polyfoam are collected for recycling. Increased usage of these items during the pandemic, has led to an increase in plastic waste.

"Now that we're working from home more, and I don't have a helper at home as a young adult, definitely more ordering takeouts rather than cooking or going out to eat, and it's unfortunate how much plastic and styrofoam we use."

"My wife orders a lot of fruits and vegetables from different channels, and they come packaged with those foams, and there's a lot of those."

"We go to the restaurants for takeaway lunches and dinners; they are not allowing us to have our own boxes and they fill it in; they are giving us styrofoam boxes."

A study by local NGO, Greener's Action, found that the single use plastic volume from food takeaway was 2.2 times more in April compared to last year. The organization says that number appears to be even worse now.

DANA WINOGRAD Founder, DB Green "During the pandemic, of course, food packaging has risen, so food and beverage is playing a big role in the increase of waste. We've seen quite an increase in the takeaway polystyrene lunch boxes - more and more people were bringing them in for recycling."

With Twenty kilograms of polyfoam and 8980 liquid packaging cartons, Dana says this tally is the highest since the recycling event started last year.

ANNE CHENG Hong Kong "This is expanded polystyrene, a type of polyfoam. It's commonly used in food packaging for delivery or take out, because it's cheaper and lighter than other plastics and also insulates well. However, it is also one of the most difficult types of plastic to process for recycling."

That's why polystyrene, like other specific plastics, is collected at this event. It requires special processing, otherwise it ends up in landfills, even if it's put in regular recycle bins.

The event's collected polystyrene then gets sent to a recycler, that sorts and melts the material into a more condensed form. It's then passed on to another recycler that processes it into pellets, which can be sold and made into new objects.

Gary from conservation group, OceansAsia, says hygiene precautions from the pandemic have set the world back five years, but reusable or compostable packaging, like Bagasse, can help solve the problem.

GARY STOKES Co-founder, OceansAsia "One of the big issues with all this organic or bio-packaging and things like that, is obviously it costs a little bit more than polystyrene. This is where I see the government possibly coming in to the rescue, where if they were to subsidize some of the home delivery operations, and maybe even come up with some sort of scheme where they cover part of the price of the packaging."

Gary warns that Hong Kong's landfills are almost at capacity. He stresses the importance of getting back into sustainability, because the pandemic's knock-on effects will have longer implications. Anne Cheng, CGTN, Hong Kong.