DSPA work on food waste moving too slow: Lawmaker

Lawmaker Wong Kit Cheng has accused the Environmental Protection Bureau (DSPA) of being too slow to address Macau’s food waste issue.

Wong made a spoken inquiry to the government during last Friday’s Legislative Assembly (AL) meeting.

While considering the government’s previous promises, Wong said she feared this would be yet another issue in which the government makes “a lot of investment for little effect.”

The lawmaker noted the government collects about 400 tons of food waste annually. At about one ton daily, the figure is considered almost residual considering food waste accounts for around 40% of all waste collected.

Wong’s inquiry mostly concerned the government’s food waste treatment center pilot project launched last year that has not been receiving enough waste to justify its operation and purpose.

The director of DSPA said the food waste treatment center is still being built, noting the current scale of waste collection has not reached the scale it will reach in the future, when the center should receive around 150 tons of food waste daily.

According to the government, the center’s purpose is to collect and process food waste to produce fertile soil through composting as well as energy production resulting from the burning of biogas released during the food waste fermentation process.

Wong asked when the government would expand the current pilot project that collects food waste from only 166 small and medium-sized restaurants, which she noted was less than 10% of all food waste production. These food and beverage and hotel industries total over 2,500 establishments in Macau.