Hong Kong. Photograph: © SAF — Coastal Care
Excerpts;
A deluge of garbage is overwhelming Hong Kong beaches. In what some refer to as a trash ‘tsunami,’ Hong Kong beaches have seen an estimated six to 10 times the usual amount of trash recently. And most of that garbage is plastic that won’t easily decompose.
Trash washing up on beaches isn’t unheard of for Hong Kong, but this amount of trash is abnormal…
Read Full Article and View Images, Inhabitat (07-11-2016)
‘Unprecedented’: Trash from China swamps Hong Kong beaches; CNN (07-06-2016)
Trash piled meters deep on beaches where children usually swim, water littered with discarded food packaging and plastic bottles. There is a tragedy happening in Hong Kong now, and effectively a solidified ‘oil spill’ of trash/plastic washing up on Hong Kong’s beaches…
Hong Kong Searches for a Culprit as Garbage Piles High on Beaches; The New York Times (07-11-2016)
Trash on beaches is an unwelcome reality for people in Hong Kong, as it is in many places in the world. In recent days, however, the city’s shores have been inundated by an overwhelming amount of debris, prompting public complaints and a search for the source of the refuse…
Plastic Pollution: “When The Mermaids Cry: The Great Plastic Tide,” Coastal Care
For more than 50 years, global production and consumption of plastics have continued to rise. An estimated 300 million tons of plastics were produced in 2015, confirming and upward trend over the past years, according to a new report by the World Economics Forum, released at Davos in January 2016.
Plastic is versatile, lightweight, flexible, moisture resistant, strong, and relatively inexpensive. Those are the attractive qualities that lead us, around the world, to such a voracious appetite and over-consumption of plastic goods. However, durable and very slow to degrade, plastic materials that are used in the production of so many products all, ultimately, become waste with staying power. Our tremendous attraction to plastic, coupled with an undeniable behavioral propensity of increasingly over-consuming, discarding, littering and thus polluting, has become a combination of lethal nature…
