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Whitefella Australian learning how to be gwai lo (鬼佬) in Hong Kong

Friday, January 7, 2011

Sustainability in the SAR

Those who know me realise that I am a bit of a nut about sustainability. I want a small carbon footprint, so that I can feel like I am putting my money where my mouth is about climate change.
Moving to a new country poses some challenges to that. Back in Australia, I knew the wider political issues around climate change, I knew about how the stationery energy sector works, far too much about waste management issues in Melbourne, and I had my transport issues sorted (bike first, then public transport, and if that couldn't work, fuel-efficient diesel small car).
So how do all these work in HK? I've only been here a week or so, and don't know many people to ask, so this will just be my first impressions of these issues. 
Firstly, the good news. In coming here we made the definite decision not to have a car. This feels good. Public transportation is so efficient here in Hong Kong that we seem to be able to get almost anywhere as quickly or quicker by public transport. Sadly, I don't yet have a bike, and can only look on in envy as the Tai Po locals cycle from place to place. There is a mixed belief in helmets here. The lycra set seem to wear them - perhaps because they are going to ride fast enough that they know they would hit hard if they fell. Then there are parents riding with children, who seem to wear them to set a good example. Most ordinary folk riding slowly, and particularly students, definitely do not. No surprises there, really. Hong Kong is also very much a walking city so there are always people out in the streets, especially late at night (certainly as late as we will ever be out). I read a statistic that nine out of ten trips in Hong Kong are by public transport, so all the people walking makes sense.
Having moved into accommodation at the University, our power and water bills are paid through M's work, so I have no idea yet about how much we will use, or whether there is a choice to buy green power here (I have seen some signs that mention this, but don't know if it means the same as in Australia). That said, I also don't know about the normal mix of power generation in Hong Kong, and how green that is (it has to be better than the brown coal power stations in Victoria - Hazlewood, I'm looking at you).
We're very sensitive to water issues in Australia, so I have wondered how that plays out here in HK. There doesn't seem to be any sense of water shortage here (certainly municipal gardens seem to be watered freely by old-fashioned sprinkler systems). Perhaps the monsoonal-type rains easily fill the water storages here, and there are certainly a lot less private gardens in Hong Kong for water to be over-used on. It doesn't take much to keep a houseplant watered in an apartment!
Lastly waste-management rears its ugly head! This seems to be quite a big issue from what I can see. There have already been a number of articles in the local papers about how the landfills are filling up fast (one article said by 2013). I have also seen lots of signs up here and there encouraging people to separate their waste into the various recycling categories, and some public locations have separate recycle bins as well as general waste bins. So there is some attention being paid to it.
On a personal level it is distressing not to be able to compost. I enjoyed using a Bokashi bin in our apartment last year in Melbourne, but that relies on having somewhere to put the partially composted material once a month, when the bin is full. I wouldn't even know where to find such a place, if it exists in our neighbourhood in Tai Po. My initial searches on the web haven't been promising, but then I can only search the sites in English, not in Cantonese. Certainly the Chinese thoughout history have been very efficient recyclers of organic waste, so I hope that expertise is not totally lost here in modern HK. In our apartment block there are recycle bins to separate waste, though even this poses some problems. One of the bins is for metals (sounds normal, right?) but then it says not to put steel cans in there. WTF?!? Recycling rates for steel around the world are around 80-90%, mostly because iron/steel is so easy to separate out from the waste-stream using a good old electromagnet. Can they really be serious? I put my steel cans in there anyway, out of a sense of hopefulness, but I felt uneasy doing so. The plastics bin does not say which numbers can be recycled, so again I put all my plastics in there. Paper and cardboard was pretty conventional, with no waxed or overly contaminated waste being acceptable. So I was left with glass bottles, and where did they go? I couldn't see any bin for them at all. Is there some other system in place for these that I don't know about yet? For now they sit forlornly in my recycling box, wondering why they are left out of the party. The answer will have to wait for future installments.

1 comment:

  1. I remember being in Edinburgh when they were starting to think about wheelie bins and recycling bins and then streets were so narrow that it was a real headache - good to hear at least there are recycling bins in Hong Kong which would probably be more of a challenge if there are lots of apartments.

    Would be lovely to see old fashioned sprinklers - esp today as it is 34 C. And remember that there are people who don't need plants and can just water their driveway (though driveways are probably less frequent there - though I also remember people cleaning their balconies by tipping water on them in Israel)

    As for no glass recylcing, that sounds strange so will look forward to updates on that!

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