As Hong Kong bans single-use plastics on April 22 (Earth Day 2024), we meet Sustainabl Planet, a local packaging company that has been working on eco alternatives of single-use plastics since 2018
Hong Kong is banning disposable plastic tableware from April 22, when Earth Day is celebrated each year. That means there will be no more plastic cutlery sold or given at restaurants—for either dine-in or takeaway—in a city that sent about 865,000 tonnes of plastic waste to landfills in 2022. The ban targets expanded polystyrene (which include styrofoam) straws, stirrers, cutlery or plates. Until 2025, cups, food containers and lids can still be sold to customers buying takeaway, but can no longer be provided for dining-in; meanwhile, hotels will no longer be allowed to sell or freely provide disposable plastics, such as bottles or umbrella bags. Oxo-degradable plastics—which degrade into harmful microplastics—are banned from being manufactured.
“There’s clearly a massive global plastic crisis,” says Richard Oliver, founder of Sustainbl Planet, which provides sustainable packaging alternatives for the food industry. Oliver, who is a corporate lawyer, started Sustainabl Planet in 2018. He was inspired by the simplicity of a straw made from lepironia grass—a weed that grows alongside rice fields in Southeast Asia—that came with his drink during a trip to Vietnam.
“It’s a great product ... these communities in the Mekong Delta, who were rice farmers and looking for other income, worked together to produce these straws.” In the year that followed, the entrepreneur connected with one of these farming communities and obtained exclusive distribution rights of the product for Hong Kong; alongside his day job, he began selling the straws to restaurants in Hong Kong.
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The more straws he sold, the more opportunities he saw to expand his line of sustainable products. “I really noticed, more and more, how much plastic and unnecessary single-use plastic was being used in Hong Kong and that’s why I decided to push forward with producing more and more products.”
Over the next few years, Sustainabl Planet began introducing more sustainable products to its repertoire. Today, it provides everything from sustainably sourced birch wood cutlery, to paper cups and lunch boxes featuring custom logos printed with chemical-free ink. The company also developed Refibr, a proprietary form of Bagasse, which is a sugarcane-derived fibrous material; it is used in the company's paper-based products. “There are quite a lot of competitive products out there that are of lower quality, and quite often they’re very sort of flimsy,” explains Oliver. “All of our Bagasse products are fully tested, chemical-free, and have the adequate certifications with the right thickness, weight and quality that we think are needed to do the job.”
