Inside Out | Tide of trash swamping Hong Kong beaches is a ticking time bomb

Over 15 years of having the good fortune to live on a beach up in Clearwater Bay, I have earned the honourable but embarrassing title of “Lap Sap Du” – or Lap Sap Dodwell in English.

I am a bit of a laughing stock among the clan villagers living nearby, as I clamber most weekends, bedraggled and sweaty, over the shoreline below my house gathering the week’s accumulated rubbish. They would respect me if I were gathering clams, or wading at sunset with a torch to snatch mesmerised squid. But dragging rubbish up the jetty from the beach is clearly seen as the height of expatriate eccentricity.

So I was bemused but gratified to see photos this week of our chief executive and several other ministers scurrying under the blazing summer sun to clear rubbish from the Shui Hau mangroves in south Lantau. Lap sap on our beaches may suddenly have become news because of the huge surge of rubbish washing up on Hong Kong beaches in the past three weeks – in particular because of the obvious pleasure of some to blame yet another social and environmental crime on the Mainland – but for Lap Sap Du it has been an infuriating constant for the past 15 years.

What perplexes me most is not the fact that lap sap keeps washing up. I suspect that used to happen millennia ago, and will be happening another millennium from now. Nor is it that so much plastic waste ends up in the water. That again seems inevitable, since plastics are so light, and float so readily. No. What infuriates me most is the gormless ignorance of so many in Hong Kong who appear to be wantonly clueless about what happens to our waste.

Back in 2003, some Chinese neighbours gathered a large mountain of leaves on the jetty in front of my house after an energy-sapping day of chopping overgrown trees. They then set light to the mountain, and wandered off leaving it smouldering into the sunset. Inevitably, the tide washed in, doused the fire, and swilled the loose par-burned leaves into the water. Today, 13 years later, those leaves still swill back and forth from the beach to the jetty. They have not decomposed. They have not gone anywhere.