Discovery Bay has been left with an unwanted reminder of Typhoon Vicente in the form of millions of raw plastic pellets blown off a ship.
As the city cleans up in the aftermath of the strongest typhoon to hit since 1999, an environmental group in Discovery Bay is calling on residents to help remove the potentially toxic plastic pellets that are strewn along the Lantau Island coastline.
The ship lost part of its cargo as it passed south of Lamma Island at the height of Monday's storm.
'This is definitely an ecological disaster because it's the equivalent of an oil spill,' said Tracey Read, who has organised regular beach clean-ups for the past six years.
More than 250 sacks of the pellets - about 100 of them empty - have been found since Read first spotted about 30 bags of pellets along Sam Pak Wan Beach on Wednesday. Each 25kg sack is estimated to carry about a million pellets.
'The pellets are inert but once they get into the sea, they act like a sponge and absorb toxic chemicals,' Read said. 'So you can have a pellet that contains many more times the chemicals than in the surrounding water.'
She said fish would eat the pellets as they resembled fish eggs. As smaller fish were eaten by bigger ones, the toxins could make their way up the food chain.