Opinion | Shopaholic Hong Kong: stop buying so many clothes if you really want to save the planet – ditching that plastic straw isn’t enough

With a recent study finding that fibres found in deep-sea creatures came from textiles, it’s time for everyone in this city to realise that our obsession with fast fashion is killing the Earth

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A model poses on the banks of the Qiantang River, in Xiaoshan district, Hangzhou, in the heart of China’s textile industry as part of a photo shoot to highlight how global demand for fast fashion is contributing to toxic water pollution. Photo: Lance Lee for Greenpeace

Published: 7:00am, 1 Apr 2019Updated: 7:13am, 1 Apr 2019

Our war on plastic seems to be gaining the traction it needs. Just last week, World Wide Fund for Nature Hong Kong released survey results that were very encouraging – 78 per cent of the city’s respondents support regulating single-use plastic utensils, with close to 60 per cent calling for a ban on all disposable tableware. In the same week, the European Parliament voted to ban single-use plastics by 2021 in all European Union member states.

It’s common knowledge that plastic pollution has killed and continues to kill marine animals – most of us have seen the disturbing images. It’s estimated that eight million tonnes of plastic waste enters the world’s oceans each year. Unfortunately, scientists have found, in a study published a little more than a month ago in the Royal Society Open Science Journal, that plastic fragments have been found in the guts of animals in the deepest ocean trenches.

That’s certainly bad news. It means that even if you were the first among your friends to have used stainless steel straws, it’s too late. Plastic-straw shaming isn’t going to save our marine life or us from ingesting plastic waste that will outlive us by thousands of years.

I’m not, of course, suggesting that we throw up our hands and go back to our evil plastic-straw-drinking ways. We simply have to recognise that all that plastic-straw-hating is just not enough.

Greenpeace East Asia and researchers from Education University found that the average concentration of tiny plastic particles in Hong Kong’s waters has gone up 11-fold – from an average concentration of 0.256 pieces of microplastic per cubic metre of water in 2015 to 3.041 pieces per cubic metre of water last year – in just three years. The culprit is, our “prevalent use of plastic packaging”, and the study dispelled the conventional belief that we have been mere victims of marine pollution flushed down from the Pearl River Delta area.

The truth is that it’s going to take a lot more than simply carrying stainless steel straws everywhere we go to help reduce plastic waste. Banning all single-use plastics isn’t going to be enough, either. The deep-sea study not only confirms that no place is unpolluted by plastic waste, it also reveals that, after fibres were analysed, researchers found that most appeared to be clothes fabrics. Our consumption habits will need to change drastically to make a difference.

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