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

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.