Inside Out | Hong Kong’s newspaper recycling ‘old ladies’ a stark reminder of city’s extreme rich-poor divide

I have a little ritual every Monday morning, as I arrive just before 7.00 in the morning at Hang Hau MTR station to come into my office. I carry with me a large carrier bag full of the past week’s newspapers. As I walk into the station, I first pass the long winding queue of elderlies standing impatiently alongside closely guarded stacks of give-away newspapers. The “vendors” only begin distributing them at 7.00am.

Then as I approach the MTR turnstiles, I randomly pick one of the four or five tiny, bent old ladies that scout the station, and drop my newspapers into her eager arms. It feels good both to be environmentally conscientious, and to be a do-gooder at the same time.

But how often do I or other do-gooders stop to think through the unimaginable hardship that sits behind this daily dawn-time scavenging that sits at the heart of Hong Kong’s paper recycling business? As we think about the extremity of social and economic inequality in Hong Kong, surely the story starts here, every morning, at MTR stations across Hong Kong.

I have absolutely no idea how many old ladies (and it seems they are normally ladies rather than old men) gather every morning around the MTR entrances, but it must surely count into thousands. Every kilo of newspaper or cardboard earns them about 70 HK cents. Apparently, these women on average earn around HK$40-50 a day – perhaps HK$1,000 a month. On the back of this crack-of-dawn activity, Hong Kong manages to recover every month about 948,000 tonnes of paper, almost all of it recycled in mainland China. The business earns Hong Kong about HK$1.37 billion in paper exports every year.

I have always thought the old ladies gather to collect newspaper partly as a hobby. After all, elderly people sleep rather less than us younger folk, and get up very early. Homes are tiny, and why not go gather early with friends, catch up on gossip, and earn a bit of pocket money at the same time to buy a little breakfast together. But I fear this rather endearing idea is naïve.

The grimmer reality is that these old ladies really need this extra cash, on top of the old age living allowance of HK$2,495 and perhaps the CSSA payment of up to HK$3,340, to pay monthly rent, and basic foods. For those of us living at the opposite end of the income spectrum, it really is almost impossible to imagine how tough life must be with a total monthly income of HK$6-7,000. And this impossibility of imagination makes it easier to avoid guilt, or any recognition that something really needs to be done about it.

It is worth remembering the extremity of inequality in Hong Kong. According to economist Branko Milanovic in his recent book Global Inequality, for a household to sit among the 70 million households worldwide that occupy the “evil empire” – the “Top 1 per cent” that have captured most of the economic gains achieved in the world economy over the past three decades – that household has to earn US$71,000 a year. That is about HK$46,000 a month. Take a quick look at Hong Kong’s household income statistics and you discover that over 23 per cent of Hong Kong families have household incomes above that level.