Trash on beaches is an unwelcome reality for people in Hong Kong, as it is in many places in the world. However, in the past few week the territory’s shores have been inundated by an overwhelming amount of debris, prompting public complaints and a search for the source of the refuse.
Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying (梁振英) said that mainland China was partly to blame.
“We’ve seen an unusual phenomenon in recent weeks that lots of domestic garbage from the mainland has washed up in Hong Kong, which we estimate could be related to heavy rainfall and flooding,” he said on Sunday as he and a dozen high-ranking officials picked up trash on Lantau Island.
Photo: AFP
The group of officials, joined by cleanup crews, picked up 1,360kg of debris, a government statement said. In the first nine days of this month, government departments collected more than 85 tonnes of debris from Hong Kong’s shores, it said.
Leung said the Hong Kong government would coordinate with the authorities in neighboring Guangdong Province to reduce the flow of marine debris.
Gary Stokes, the Hong Kong-based Asia director for the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, an environmental group, said he first noticed the abnormally large amount of debris last month.
As residents began reporting more polluted beaches, environmentalists combed through the collected material. Information on wrappers and packaging points to a mainland source.
“The trash we have on the beaches here is just horrendous,” Stokes said in an interview. “At the moment, a large amount of it is mainland debris.”
One possible culprit is the island of Wailingding, which is south of Hong Kong.
Stokes posted a series of photographs on Facebook that he received from sailors showing debris spilling from a large dump on Wailingding that abuts the coast, but he cautioned that the dump site is unlikely to be the sole source of the trash problems.
The increased public awareness could help bolster recycling initiatives in Hong Kong, such as the introduction of a deposit for plastic bottles, he said.
Some Hong Kong residents criticized Leung’s trash-picking trip on Sunday as a political show.
Paul Zimmerman, a district councilor, complained on Facebook that the chief executive did not separate the debris for recycling or attempt to identify the source, but Stokes said that he thought the officials’ cleanup was important.
“For me, the important fact is they cannot deny it,” Stokes said. “When we approach them in the future to talk about this we can say: ‘Remember that day on the beach?’”
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