Land shortage is a well-documented issue in Hong Kong. Not only has it caused a housing crisis but also a waste crisis. The city has already used up 13 landfills. Meanwhile, Hong Kong's three remaining landfill sites are piled high with trash and are set to reach capacity by 2020. Experts fear the worst.

"Our landfills are expanding; perhaps 10% [of space] left and we cannot find anywhere to build any new one except the expansion of the existing ones," says Chan King Ming, director of environmental science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

One step the government is taking to try and reduce waste is to introduce a mandatory waste charging plan. Under the proposed scheme, residents will need to pay for designated plastic bags for their trash. The hope is that the plan will make residents produce less waste and encourage recycling, which is free.

The charge will be 4 cents (HK$ 30 cents) for the smallest .8 gallon (3-liter) bag, while the biggest 26-gallon bag will cost $1.40. Once the scheme takes effect, a household of three is estimated to pay about 22 cents every day for the standard 4-gallon bag – roughly the same size as a supermarket plastic bag – running a tab of about $6.50 per month.

Residents receiving welfare payments will be given subsidies for their costs. Failure to dispose of waste with the designated bags will lead to fines and under severe circumstances, imprisonment.

In recent years, the city has been sending 10,700 tons of municipal waste to its landfills each day. That is much higher than many other major cities. The government set an ambitious goal of reducing waste by 40% by 2022, but local green groups remain doubtful that the target will be met.

Hahn Chu, director of environmental advocacy at The Green Earth, a local environmental consultancy, points out that the government previously set a goal of reducing the average waste disposal per person by 20% by 2017, a goal it failed to meet.

"Therefore, I'm not confident that the government can make the 40% target by 2022," he says.

Other Asian cities have shown that quantity-based waste charging can be an effective policy tool in driving behavioral change in reducing waste. Seoul in South Korea introduced a waste charging scheme in 1995. Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, introduced its scheme in 2000. Both cities have managed to reduce waste by more than 30%.

Hong Kong hopes its own waste charging scheme will reduce waste disposal by at least 20%. "Waste charging aims to create financial incentives to drive behavioral changes in both waste generation and recycling, and hence reduce overall waste disposal," says Fanny Hui of Hong Kong's Environment Bureau.

However, amid ongoing anti-government protests in the city, it is not yet clear when the scheme will be introduced. "Waste charging is definitely needed in Hong Kong since it is a powerful driver to push waste reduction," says Chu with The Green Earth. "But the sad thing is, under the current political climate, we're not optimistic the relevant legislation can be passed before the current session of the Legislative Council."

Delays aside, while a majority of residents in the city support the need to reduce waste and recycle more, some argue that businesses, rather than households, should bear the cost of a waste charging scheme as a lot of trash comes from unnecessary packaging that companies add to their products. It's an issue that the government has said that it plans to address.

"We plan to collaborate with the retail trade to explore practical measures to promote and encourage reducing the use of plastic packaging materials," says Hui. "We feel the responsibility for reducing waste should be shared by the whole community on equity grounds and in line with the 'polluter-pays' principle and waste charging should be implemented across the board for all sectors."

However, although a welcome and important step toward reducing waste in the city, some fear the waste charging scheme alone is not enough to tackle Hong Kong's growing waste problem.

A third of Hong Kong's municipal waste comes from food waste -a biodegradable resource that can be converted to compost and biofuels. But Hong Kong still sends some 7.3 million pounds of food waste to its landfills every day.

"We also need waste collection and recycling infrastructures for people to divert unavoidable waste," says Wendell Chan, project officer at Friends of the Earth Hong Kong, an environmental campaigning organization. "Being able to recycle food waste alone would drastically cut down on the volume of waste going into landfills."

The city doesn't have a recycling plant except one for electronic waste, Chan says. "We need to set up a recycling bureau … Education and public awareness are important to get people to understand why we need to tackle waste, but they only play a complementary role. What Hong Kong needs is both policy and infrastructure solutions."