Just exactly where does your trash land? Answer - it depends on what you dispose and how you dispose them. That is to say you have all the power to make good decisions in both of these stages.
What You Dispose
Understanding Sustainability Labels
I know you feel good when you get that "100% compostable" or "100% biodegradable" soap. You have great intentions. The truth is, if you purchase them in Hong Kong, they can carry the opposite meaning. Here are some sustainability certification labels:
Sources (from left to right): BPI, European Bioplastics and TUV Austria
A lot of these Western certifications acknowledge these products as compostable or biodegradable in an industrial setting.
Plastics vs plastics
Take a plastic product around you and see if you can find a recycle label. If they are carefully labelled you'll see a number within the recycle label - that identifies the type of plastic. If you have a 1 PET, it's probably the easiest to recycle as they are the most widely used and thus easier to process in scale. Beeclean tablets are packaged with 4 LDPE - found commonly in plastic bags and wrapping - while requires specialized facilities, can be processed in Hong Kong. This is just talking about resin plastic.
As for biodegradable or compostable plastic, some of them are still produced using fossil fuels. Unlike resin plastic, biodegradable or compostable plastic still do not have any labels for you to identify other than the certification.
How You Dispose
If you dispose in recycling bins in your apartment, more of than not it ends up together in a landfill. Be careful about where you dispose your items.
If you go to recycle spots like 6, you will see that they need you to separate your products to very specific categories. With plastic for example, they need you to separate the bottles (as most of them use PET, and thus can be recycled together).
When we talk about sustainable certifications, remember that a lot of them mean they are either biodegradable and compostable only in an industrial setting. While these facilities exist the US and Europe, in Hong Kong, we have very few industrial facilities that can process these products and thus ending up on a landfill. When not treated properly, they produce methane, which is worse than your typical plastic. Even if they end up in the facility, they would have to be processed in a very large scale.
What Makes Beeclean Different
Our products aim to be truly 100% compostable anywhere, that means you can just put our products on soil and it will degrade naturally without any additional treatment. This means while you can enjoy the products, we also wanna give you the benefit of knowing that you are not secretly hurting the planet in any way.
Our current tablets use food grade 3-layer LDPE, which you can reuse if washed and processed properly in Hong Kong if disposed.
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