Incorporating Green Considerations in Events | Resource and Circularity | Performance (Environment) | Swire Properties Sustainability Report 2024

Incorporating Green Considerations in Events

Events are an important part of Swire Properties’ placemaking and community-building efforts. Since launching our Green Guidelines for Event Management and Production of Collaterals in 2018, our Marketing, Event Management and Administration teams have worked diligently to incorporate the guidelines into their event planning, production and execution efforts.

White Christmas Street Fair 2024

2024’s White Christmas Street Fair continued to work towards being a zero-waste event. A total of 93.8% of event setup materials and consumer waste was diverted from landfills.

Numerous circularity measures were adopted during the event, including:

Collaborating with community partners including Taikoo Primary School and The Hong Kong Down Syndrome Association to upcycle 40,000 coffee capsules into charming Christmas string lights.
Using lighting, water and electrically-generated flame effects for the bonfires, creating flicker effects without combustion, reducing pollution.
Using digital food and drink coupons and compostable and recyclable packaging to reduce paper waste.
Serving all food and drinks in reusable cups, containers and utensils through a “bring your own” promotion and an onsite borrow-and-return booth, preventing the disposal of 17,000 single-use cups and containers.
Utilising fully reversible 3D printed quartz sand to create Christmas decorations that can be broken down and reused, replacing non-recyclable fiberglass decorations.
Using fully recyclable D-board and FSC-certified wood instead of foam board.
Setting up recycling bins to ensure the proper disposal and recycling of food waste and other recyclables.

All these measures resulted in the fair’s waste diversion rate improving once again – the rate has consistently improved over the past three years, rising from 90.4% in 2021 to 93.8% in 2024. We also conducted a comprehensive carbon audit and circularity assessment for the event for the fourth consecutive year and installed electricity meters for more accurate monitoring and management of the event’s energy use. This helped us understand its environmental impact and identify areas of high carbon emissions, such as electricity consumption and the transportation of event set-up materials.

Annual Dinner 2024

Our 2024 Annual Dinner in Hong Kong once again focused on sustainability. Features incorporated into the event included:

Organising the “Most Sustainable Costume Award” for the second year, encouraging colleagues to incorporate innovative and creative sustainability elements into their costumes.
Adopting recommendations from the WWF-Hong Kong Seafood Guide and following the Swire Pacific Sustainable Food Policy to ensure that only sustainable seafood items were included in the menu.
Setting up a costume collection box at the venue to let participants donate their costumes to The Salvation Army of Hong Kong after the event.
Switching from a buffet-style dinner to Chinese round table dinner to enhance food portion control and minimise food waste.
Donating surplus food to Food Angel, an NGO that “rescues” edible surplus food that would otherwise be disposed of as waste.
Banning decorative materials made using Styrofoam and using set-up materials that can be reused or recycled, such as FSC-certified D-board.

With support from our event agency, venue partner and recycling partners, we conducted a thorough event circularity assessment to record the respective weight of materials that were reused, recycled or sent to landfill after the event. Overall, the Annual Dinner improved its waste diversion rate from 79% to 85% compared to 2023.

ChristmasVille at Pacific Place

This year, Pacific Place enhanced circularity considerations in its Christmas campaign. The mall proactively identified opportunities to repurpose, reuse and recycle the larger-than-life. The main character, The Grand Weaver, was carefully dismantled and its metal components were recycled. Decorative items, including furniture, character figurines, garlands and ornaments, were adopted by Pacific Place members, stakeholders and charitable organisations; whereas the rest were packed and will be reused in future events where appropriate. We also sent natural Christmas trees to the government’s Y Park, to convert them into useful products, such as mulch and wood chips for landscaping use.

Supporting Circular Fashion Events

“Get Redressed” 2024

This year, Swire Properties once again partnered with Redress, a Hong Kong-based NGO dedicated to promoting circular fashion. In May 2024, 23 collection points were set up at office lobbies and malls across Swire Properties’ Hong Kong portfolio to collect unwanted second-hand clothing of any style and brand from the public. More than 2,900 kg of collected clothing was then organised in a “sort-a-thon”, with a pop-up second-hand clothing event held at Taikoo Place in mid-June.

Pacific Place also joined Redress’ year-round Clothing Takeback Programme in 2024 by setting up a Redress box in the mall. The collected clothes were redistributed to local charity partners, sold in second-hand shops or recycled. Then, in September, Cityplaza hosted the Redress Design Awards 2024 Finalists’ Exhibition, a world-leading sustainable fashion design competition designed to educate and empower fashion designers about circular design techniques to reduce the fashion industry’s negative environmental impacts. The exhibition displayed the 10 finalists’ outfits, helping to raise awareness about sustainable design.

Métier Minus – Supporting Youth and Women Empowerment with Circular Fashion

Building on the success of previous events held in 2023, Taikoo Place and Pacific Place supported Métier Minus – a “post-loved luxury fashion charity pop-up” again this year. Held at ArtisTree and Pacific Place in January and September 2024 respectively for a total of 15 days, the two public events sold more than 680 pieces of post-loved luxury fashion items including clothes, accessories and shoes made by designer brands, extending the life of high-quality fashion items.

The two events raised over HKD570,000, with the proceeds used to finance programmes created by Métier Minus and St. James’ Settlement to support young people with mental health, confidence building and sustainability education, and workshops for youth and women that empowered them through training and job opportunities.

Earth Month 2024 in Miami

For Earth Month 2024 in Miami, Swire Properties partnered with a Florida-based start-up that turns textiles and shoes into second-hand goods to champion sustainable change. The company is focused on tackling the issue of textile recycling and their business model encourages community members to schedule pickups to recycle old shoes and clothing to prevent these items from entering landfills.

We placed a collection bin at Brickell City Centre and invited residents, shoppers, office workers and the wider community to donate textiles and shoes which were then picked up and recycled. This year, over 520 kg of textiles were donated.

Embedding Resource and Circularity into Shopping

In 2024, we increased our efforts to include resource and circularity concepts into shopper promotions and shopping events at our malls in Hong Kong. In August, Citygate Outlets collaborated with Mil Mill, Hong Kong’s first pulp mill, to collect waste paper from Lantau Island communities, mall merchants and mall recycling bins, for a large-scale origami paper upcycling project.

A two-metre-tall sculpture of a magician and flying magic book pages was crafted over a three-month period from recycled paper made from the collected waste paper and more than 100 paper flowers upcycled from our festive Chinese New Year installation. Our CLUB CG members were also eligible to receive a foldable umbrella made from 100% recycled plastic bottles.

In November, Pacific Place partnered with V Cycle, a local environmental social enterprise, to collect and recycle beauty product containers. We set up a collection bin in the mall that accepted several types of beauty product packaging for recycling, including plastic bottles, and those with glass and metal components. Customers using the box were rewarded with above points to encourage them to keep recycling.

Pacific Place and Starstreet Precinct also gave above members a green giveaway for Easter, featuring a cute bear and Easter basket created from some 200 kg of plastic materials upcycled from this year’s Chinese New Year installations.

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Ramping Up Waste Recycling Efforts

Swire Properties continued working with our hotels, restaurants and tenants to improve food waste reduction and expanded our recycling programmes with new partners.

Expanding Our Smart Reuse Programmes to Support the Circular Economy

To minimise waste generation and cultivate a reuse culture, Swire Properties is continually scaling up our programmes that encourage reusable options for F&B outlets.

Reuse and Recycling of Furniture and Fittings

Swire Properties continues to broaden our initiatives to promote the reuse and recycling of furniture and fittings in fit-out and renovation projects.