My editors at The Post discourage me from writing about the coming climate crisis, because their big data tells them no one is interested. I continue to write, in the hope that this will change, and that we, too, will soon join the rest of the world in paying urgent attention to moving towards a sustainable future.

As award-winning environmental journalist Pilita Clark wrote recently in The Financial Times, even though 60 countries have promised to get to “net zero” by 2050, or are actively considering such a promise, most governments remain clueless about how we get there.

Most voters demanding “net zero” commitments are equally clueless about the awesome implications of the challenge and the lifestyle changes this will imply.

In Britain, for example, a report for the government’s Committee on Climate Change noted that 20,000 conventional cars will need to be removed from UK roads every week for the next 31 years if the “net zero” goals are to be reached.

In each week of last year, just 1,200 low-emission vehicles were registered: “…the scale of change needed to strip emissions out of our daily lives is so huge it means no home or office will be untouched,” Clark writes.

Since reading that report, I have trawled the internet, and dozens of “net zero” Ted Talks, to learn what “net zero” will mean for us run-of-the-mill consumers. And it is daunting.

Cheery US speakers like Lauren Singer, whose blog “Trash is for Tossers” attracts millions, and Germany’s Bea Johnson – both of them arriving on stage holding a single dainty jam jar that they say contains the entirety of their waste for a family of four for a year – talk breezily of buying in bulk, composting and buying second-hand shoes and clothes.

Face to face with the grim, ugly realities of the global food crisis

I then open my bathroom cabinet and instantly count 34 plastic bottles. I dare not open my kitchen cupboards. We have a way to go.

That sense of scale was magnified opening this month’s National Geographic to browse a mesmerising section on our “Addiction to Plastic” – that miracle material that “has now become the stuff of nightmares.”

Even though bottled water costs 10,000 times more than tap water, its worldwide sales volume passed that of soft drinks last year. Worldwide, a million plastic bottles are bought every minute, with fewer than 10 per cent recycled in most countries.

Last year, 24.2 billion pairs of shoes were sold, most destined for the landfill because they are stitched, glued and moulded together in such complicated ways. More than a billion toothbrushes are discarded every year in the US alone: nearly every one produced since the 1930s, National Geographic’s report notes, is still “continuing on as a piece of trash”. One wonders what the archaeologists 20,000 years from now will think about that.

While over 60 million car tyres sit rotting in US landfills, most of the harm they do occurs during their “working” lives: friction from the road strips rubber from the tire, rain washes it away, and the result is that synthetic rubber from tyres makes up an estimated 28 per cent of all of the microplastic waste reaching our oceans.

Southeast Asia’s landfills expose the big Western lie about recycling

More than 3 trillion cigarette butts get discarded every year, with their filters – made of cellulose acetate – ending up as snack-sized morsels for fish and other sea life.

Without going too deeply into the gory details, tampons, sanitary towels and diapers – and the plastic wrapping they come in – are massive populators of landfills. National Geographic says the average women will use around 10,000 tampons or pads in her lifetime.

The US Environmental Protection Agency says over 27 billion diapers are used every year in the US alone – many kids use five a day – all of them packed with “super-absorbent polymers”.

Land-scarce Hong Kong needs to think bigger about waste management

Food will need to be bought unwrapped, and then meticulously composted – easy in a spacious English garden, but not so easy on the 52nd floor of a Tseung Kwan O high-rise (unless an intelligent and progressive developer has included a ground floor composting centre).

At some point soon, Hong Kong’s millennials will rejoin the rest of the world recognising the scale of the global warming challenge, and we need to be prepared. Our government needs to begin thinking about the lifestyle implications. They are monumental, and for many of our hyperconsumers, not at all welcome.

David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view