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Friday, March 29, 2024

Plastic choking Hong Kong

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HONG KONG—A little girl shrieks with excitement as she strolls along the beach: “Oh look mummy. Hong Kong snow.”

Despite the cold snap what she’s pointing to is not a meteorological anomaly—but in fact swathes of polystyrene thrown out as rubbish.

The city is suffocating under a film of plastic: “Each day the equivalent weight of two A380 Airbus planes is discarded” in domestic waste, says Lisa Christensen, co-founder of HK Clean Up initiative.

Add to this trashed industrial and commercial plastic, and more than 2,000 tons of the material is thrown out daily in Hong Kong—saturating landfill sites but also clogging up country parks, coastal areas and waterways.

“For our supermarket generation the focus is on convenience, issues of pollution seem very far away,” says local environmental campaigner Jo Wilson, whose daughter highlighted the “Hong Kong snow” problem.

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“People produce double digit pieces of trash—especially plastic—just by having lunch. Hong Kong has an army of cleaners and helpers so perhaps some people are not used to taking care,” she explains, adding a long hours culture, excessive packaging by the food industry, and lack of public education are exacerbating the problem. 

Globally plastics production has surged from 15 million tons in 1964 to 311 million tons in 2014—the weight of 900 Empire State Buildings—and is expected to double in 20 years as demand grows, according to “The New Plastics Economy” report presented by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation at the World Economic Forum in January.

The situation in Hong Kong is pronounced because it is “an extremely consumption-based society,” Christensen says. “On average we generate 1.36kg (3lbs) of domestic waste per person, per day. Tokyo, on the other hand, only generates 0.77kg.”

While there has been some success encouraging people to recycle paper and some metals, the situation is deteriorating for plastics: Just five percent of plastic was sent for recycling in 2014—compared with 25 percent in 2005, according to government figures.

Recycling is not mandatory in Hong Kong, but efforts by authorities to push the practice have been undermined by media reports revealing items separated after use by consumers have ended up being mixed up or dumped. 

There is also little incentive for plastics recycling contractors in the city, because their profits are dented by the costs of transport and sorting, and with low global oil prices new plastic is cheaper for manufacturers to buy than reworked material. Due to limited facilities, most items are processed in mainland China.

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