As one employee stated it when explaining what it was, if the Environment Protection Department is the stick (armed with laws and regulations), the Compliance Assistance Centre set up in September in Hong Kong is the carrot. The center main mission is to educate people in specific industries on how to comply better with environment standards and how it can benefit their image to do so (the carrot). The center focuses on four areas: the construction industry, vehicle repair shops, restaurants and property management.
The attitude of the center is quite passive, waiting for interested parties to contact them. From the material distributed at the booth, the focus is also on big companies. Indeed all documents are thick reports that only a company with a legion of administrative staff would read. Even if the initiative is good I am not sure the carrot (a better image) will be big enough to attract the bulk of companies in the targeted industries where image may not be a top priority.
The other limitations of the center is that it only provides information and will send companies to other third-parties for actual services to help them, significantly affecting convenience. My first feeling on the Compliance Assistance Centre is that it should focus on a bottom-up approach with targeted trial programs with few picked companies rather than a top-down one. The carrot would appear much bigger with successful case studies done with other small businesses.
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