Pellets spill during typhoon sparked big volunteer clean-up on Hong Kong beaches
The flood of pellets during a typhoon was overhyped, but it did prompt thousands of volunteers to clean up Hong Kong beaches - and send a signal to officials
When Severe Typhoon Vicente hit Hong Kong last month, the wind and waves rocked a freighter, tossing six container loads of plastic pellets into the sea. Containers were torn open and there were reports of pellet bags and their contents being strewn along beaches. First in Discovery Bay, then elsewhere, environmentalists highlighted a "plastic disaster", which even gained its own Facebook page.
Although photographer and eco-campaigner Gary Stokes compared the incident to a "solidified oil spill" I wondered just how disastrous it would prove. After all, living on Cheung Chau I am used to seeing a host of plastic items and other rubbish floating in the sea and washed up on tidelines.
Joining volunteers who came to clean up pellets at Cheung Chau two weeks ago, I wondered even more. Most picked pellets from gazetted beaches with daily cleaning services. I took five volunteers to a secluded beach without any government- organised cleaning, which is a black spot for waterborne refuse.
Sure enough, pellets abounded at this beach. In places, you could grab them by the handful. Yet there was far more other rubbish, especially polystyrene. A few people gathered some of this, shoving it into big rubbish bags for later collection. Among them was Nico Zurcher, who told me he obtained a master's degree partly through studying plastic pellets on Hong Kong beaches. Even with this expert background, Zurcher seemed unsurprised by the spillage, given that plastic pellets had accumulated on beaches for years - so I figured it worth considering if it really was a disaster.
First, a dictionary check, and I find Merriam-Webster defining disaster as: "A sudden calamitous event bringing great damage, loss, or destruction."
That certainly applies in cases such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which occurred in March 1989 as an oil tanker ripped open on a reef and flooded an Alaskan inlet with oil. Perhaps 100,000 to 250,000 seabirds were killed, billions of salmon and herring eggs were destroyed, and it may be another two decades before some shoreline habitats recover.