At the annual ReThink HK 2025 conference, a team of five HKU students from the SLGP Programme Seunghyun Hong, Kyoko Dobashi, Clarence Watt, Wang On Y., and Kenna Chan partnered with the youth-led organization 2041 Hong Kong to launch a Circular Economy Social Experiment. The initiative engaged conference attendees to gauge public perception and assess the feasibility of implementing circular economy principles within Hong Kong.

Our students would like to share a quick overview of what they found from the experiment and a few words of appreciation:
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●    Most participants were from the Private Sector/Business (54%), followed by NGO/Non-profit/Civil Society (20%), Academia/Research/Students (15%), Others (8%), and Government/Public Sector (3%).

●    74% of participants felt that the description, “The Circular Economy is an approach that focuses on recycling to reduce landfill waste while improving resource efficiency,” doesn’t fully capture what CE is all about.

●    When asked who should take the lead in implementing the Circular Economy, participants ranked Government highest (35.6%), followed by Businesses (26.7%), Consumers (22.3%), NGOs (9.2%), and Academia/Researchers (6.2%). This shows that people mainly expect public authorities and companies to drive the change.

●    The biggest barriers to CE implementation were seen as unsupportive Policies and Regulations (36.7%) and Financial Concerns (34.9%). Limited consumer understanding, supply chain complexity, and lack of executive leadership were mentioned less often (all under 15%).

●    Supportive Government Policies and Regulations were also seen as the top enabler (43.4%), with Financial Incentives next (23.3%). Consumer awareness, executive leadership, and collaborative supply chains were seen as smaller supporting factors.

A big thank you to Dr. Margaret Burnett (Hinch), Christie Lai, CEP®, Rachel Yan, Justin Yeung, Leon Schachter, Adella Budianto, Sophie, Queenie, and Shruthe Kirupakaran for all their guidance and support in making this experiment possible. And of course, thanks to ReThink HK for supporting us!

We look forward to digging deeper into the data and publishing a full report soon. If you’re curious about the findings, reach out to us and 2041 Hong Kong on LinkedIn. Stay tuned!

Applications are now open for the Master of Social Sciences in Sustainability Leadership and Governance programme (SLGP) for the 2026-27 academic year!
🔗Apply now: https://lnkd.in/gzwVfGmY

👉For more details about our MSocSc Sustainability Leadership and Governance programme (SLGP), please visit https://ccsg.hku.hk/slgp/.