New Drinking Fountains To Spring Up At Govt Sites

Around 500 new drinking fountains are to be installed in parks and other government sites to try to help Hongkongers cut back on their use of plastic bottles.

Chief Secretary Matthew Cheung said on Sunday that the number of drinking fountains at government venues would increase by 20 percent over the next few years to around 3,200.

Writing on his blog, he noted that the government is also planning a pilot scheme later this year to see how useful it would be to use vending machines to collect plastic bottles rather than dispensing them.

In late 2017, the government announced that it was banning the sale of small bottles of water in vending machines on government premises including parks, sports facilities and performance venues.

But when the ban was expected to come into place in February the following year, environment officials admitted that such bottles were still available in many locations, although future contracts with vendors would specify that the products should not be stocked.

Local green groups recently estimated that more than 1.7 billion drinks containers end up as waste in the city's landfills, or as litter on land and in the sea. They claimed that unless action is taken, this figure this could swell to over 2 billion by 2030.