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Jimmy Chow

Hongkonger Rosie Chan Man-wai left school at 15 to work and support her single mother.
“I worked three jobs and thought that would be my life,” she said.
Chan, an entrepreneur in her mid-thirties, recalled how she turned her fate around.
“I’ve never given up on learning. More than a decade later, I forced my way back into education and that changed everything.”
That determination eventually brought her back to Polytechnic University in 2020 as a senior student, where she studied environmental and interior design.
There, she began to see design as a way to reshape systems and communities.
She resolved to tackle Hong Kong’s growing food waste problems after working on farms in Japan in 2015.
“I lived in a place where nothing was wasted. Food scraps went back into the soil, and I did not even touch a rubbish bin for a month,” she said.
“Coming back to Hong Kong, where thousands of tonnes of food waste are dumped into landfills every day, I felt shocked. I asked myself: if no one is solving this problem, perhaps I should try?”
That conviction grew into Japjap Zero Waste, a company she founded in 2023 with a patent filed for its modular AIoT bio-recycling system.
The machines, which she said were the first of their kind in Hong Kong, can be configured like Lego, use black soldier fly larvae to turn food waste into organic fertiliser and protein-rich feed.
But for Chan, technology is never enough.
“Even the best machine will not work if people do not understand it,” she said. “That is why education [for now] is part of our mission. We train student leaders, give talks in schools and show children how waste becomes a resource. They learn by doing.”

According to Chan, the company has now processed more than 100 tonnes of food waste and reached more than 50,000 students, educators and community members.
Partnerships span 10 schools, NGOs such as HKFYG Organic Farm, and local farms that receive surplus fertiliser and larvae.
Her efforts had won her a nomination for this year’s Spirit of Hong Kong Awards in the entrepreneurship category.
Over the last two years, her venture secured multiple prizes, including the Asia Social Innovation Award, the JCIHK Creative Young Entrepreneur Asia-Pacific competition and the Hong Kong Social Enterprise Challenge, raising more than HK$5 million (US$642,410) in funding.
But Chan said the real prize was seeing communities change.
“When I see children proudly feeding larvae with their lunchbox scraps or a farmer using our fertiliser for new crops, I know this is why I became an entrepreneur,” she said.
“I’ve failed many times, but each failure gave me something new to test.”
She added that the spirit of Hong Kong was defined by courage and persistence, while entrepreneurship was a story of resilience as much as it was about business.
The Spirit of Hong Kong Awards is co-organised by the Post and the Sino Group to recognise the efforts of the city’s unsung heroes who contribute to the community or inspire others with stories of how they overcome personal challenges.


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Hong Kong

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Rosie Chan has been nominated in entrepreneur category of Spirit of Hong Kong Awards for her bio-recycling system


Rosie Chan has been nominated in entrepreneur category of Spirit of Hong Kong Awards for her bio-recycling system.


Spirit of Hong Kong

JAPJAP Zero Waste

From dropout to ecopreneur: how this Hongkonger is turning food waste into resources

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Rosie Chan has been nominated in entrepreneur category of Spirit of Hong Kong Awards for her bio-recycling system

Rosie Chan has been nominated in entrepreneur category of Spirit of Hong Kong Awards for her bio-recycling system