We are born to eat, to buy and therefore to produce waste. The sealed plastic bags full of stuff, repeated toilet flushes and recyclable materials we throw away every day all enter the cycle of municipal waste treatment.
Considering the 'productivity' of the Hong Kong population, that's thousands of tonnes of rubbish being discarded each year.
Even though we have three landfills in the New Territories, as long as we continue to throw away things the way we do, these landfills will have short lives. They will be full by the middle of the decade at the latest.
Ignoring the problem means that a few years down the road, our waste will have to be disposed of somewhere else.
We might hardly notice this, because our waste doesn't pile up overnight in our backyard - but the government does.
An expansion of the landfill site in Tseung Kwan O has been proposed. A plot of land reserved for industrial use and some parts of the Clearwater Bay Country Park are to be compromised.