Letters | Another year, another extra 4,000 tonnes of plastic cutlery in landfills: Hong Kong should be ashamed
- Daily waste disposed per person in 2017 was the highest since 1991, with plastic dining ware disposal alone up by 7.7 per cent
- Senior Hong Kong officials often visit foreign countries to learn good policies and practices. Will this extend to plastics?
Department data shows that daily plastic dining ware disposal increased from 154 tonnes to 166 tonnes, or by 7.7 per cent. This means that, in one year, an extra 4,380 tonnes of disposable plastic dining ware were used and dumped into our landfills. If these disposable plastic items had not been collected as garbage, they would probably have been resting forever in our seas or in the stomach of marine organisms.
Worldwide concern about plastic pollution reached its highest level last year. Our government and the business sector launched several initiatives to be seen to be tackling the problem. Large fast-food chains such as McDonald’s launched a “No Straw Monday” campaign last September in Hong Kong. This was upgraded to become “no straw every day” in December. But worthwhile though such an initiative is, these chains provide many other disposable plastic items, even for dine-in customers.
No-straw or no-cup-lid campaigns by the various fast-food chains address only a tiny part of the problem, rather than seeking to deal with it holistically. Our government and local businesses should be ashamed of doing so little here in Hong Kong.
Edwin Lau Che-feng, executive director, The Green Earth