IMAGINE the frustrations of being a volunteer on the environment front. You clean up a beach one week, the next week it's littered again. You plant trees on a hillside, and within six months they have burnt to the ground.
It's enough to make all but the most committed give up. Yet one green group is fighting back.
The Conservancy Association has set up a special training programme for volunteers, called the Environmental Pioneer Scheme.
It has all the trappings of an education course, with seminars, assessments and, at the end, an award certifying the course has been passed.
The scheme was the brainchild of Gordon Ng Ting-leung, formerly the association's general secretary and now its spokesman, who felt knowledge about the environment and good intentions were not enough.
''There was a gap in that people were aware of the problem but they may not have been doing anything about it,'' Mr Ng said.
