EVA LAU SUK-FONG prefers shrink-wrapped groceries from her supermarket. 'They're cleaner,' she says. Lau, a 40-year-old mother of two, started buying most of her shopping at supermarkets about five years ago and these days fills six to seven plastic bags of shopping a day.
Her family's garbage has also been growing noticeably, too - it's now reaching as much as 4.5kg a day. And like most Hong Kong households, it all goes in the bin.
'I never put rubbish [out] for recycling because it's too troublesome to separate items and take them to recycling bins,' says Lau, who lives in Oi Man Estate, Ho Man Tin, with her husband Leung Yau-keung, 42, and their two daughters Amy, 11, and Sharon, nine. Like many households, they don't think about where their rubbish goes.
It goes to a landfill, like everyone else's. Each night, the Leung family's waste is loaded into a truck for a one-hour drive to a vast West Kowloon transfer station in Lai Chi Kok. There, it's compressed into blocks the size of a small office space (about 40.7 cubic metres) and loaded onto floating barges and taken on a four-hour journey to the 110-hectare Nim Wan landfill in Tuen Mun, the largest of Hong Kong's three facilities.
Thirteen years ago, it was a beautiful bay. Today it's the final resting place for one-third of Hong Kong's rubbish: 6,600 tonnes of waste arrive daily from Kowloon, Hong Kong Island and the outlying islands.
The grassless slope looks like any other hillside under construction. Underneath, staff say, is rubbish piled four storeys high.