The pandemic’s impact on the environment; and potential health risk of BPS

8:30am-9:15am: pandemic’s impact on the environment

8:30am-8:50am: Dr Kenneth Leung, Assistant Director (Air Policy), Environmental Protection Department 

8:30am-9:00am: Patrick Fung, CEO, Clean Air Network

8:45am-9:15am: Helga Vanthournout, Senior Advisor of ADM Capital Foundation

8:45am-9:15am: Gary Stokes, co-founder and Directors of Operations of OceansAsia , Formerly the Asia Director for Sea Shepherd Global

9:15am-9:30am: potential health risk of BPS

9:15am-9:30am:Professor Cai Zongwei, Chair Professor of the Department of Chemis-try and Director of the State Key Laboratory of Environmental and Biological Analysis at HKBU

On Wednesday’s Backchat:  the pandemic’s impact on the environment; and the potential health risk of a common chemical compound used in food packaging and paper products.

Early in the pandemic we all saw them… pictures of clear blue skies in normally smoggy cities… an unintended byproduct of the pandemic and the widespread shutdown of industry across the globe.

But as the world adapts to Covid, the bad air has returned. A new study has found concentrations of pollutants here in Hong Kong increased by up to 12 percent last year — mostly due to the low base of comparison. Still, things were better in 2021 compared with pre-pandemic years…

Is there any way to make the few positives brought by Covid-19 last? Is the environment going to suffer further as the world slowly moves past the pandemic?

After 9.15am, we'll speak to a professor who found that a chemical compound called BPS — that was touted as a safe alternative to its more unstable cousin BPA — may itself increase cancer risk and spur breast cancer growth.