It has to be green, healthy and tasty

Hong Kong's sustainable beverage pioneers are also looking for new ways to cooperate with more restaurants and bars for better sustainable development in the catering business.

Penicillin is the city's first sustainable bar that creates a closed-loop ecosystem from the kitchen to the table to conserve energy, minimize pollution and reduce carbon footprints.

The bar has four segments - a laboratory, a main bar, a kitchen and a fermentation room - for recycling and upcycling ingredients before they are thrown away. The waste, such as lemon peels, husks and seeds, would be collected and processed through the four chambers to be turned into hand sanitizers or liquid with a special fragrance for mopping floors, says Agung Prabowo, one of Penicillin's four co-founders.

Meanwhile, the bar partners with ecoSPIRITS, a company that helps to eliminate packaging waste from the spirits supply chain, to produce the spirits it needs for making cocktails. Penicillin's menu shows that each cocktail made through this arrangement can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by an average of 150 grams.

"When we think about what (kind of bar) Hong Kong does not have, (we know) the answer is a sustainable bar," says Laura Prabowo, Penicillin's co-founder and managing director. As a veteran in the food-and-beverage business, she says that the industry is the third-largest producer of waste and "it's time for us to give something back".