The Situation: Urban Areas More than 10,300 street cleaners and contracted workers manually sweep our streets and public areas every single day, removing copious amounts of litter and trash. Waste originating from our homes, schools and city streets is bagged and sent to already-full landfills, or swept down storm drains and washed out to sea. As a result of this very efficient management and removal, many people have the perception that Hong Kong is clean and are not aware of the excessive trash issue that we face. In fact, however, our city streets are littered with trash – while we often do not see it, the quantity of refuse in Hong Kong’s streets, alleys, gutters and storm drains is large, and has increased in recent years likely as a result of the tremendous pressure on the entire waste chain caused by the sheer volume of waste being produced every day: in 2014 we sent an estimate 14,859 tonnes of trash to landfill per day. This vast amount of urban debris must be reduced, as it is a strain not only on our economy and the city’s infrastructure, but on the very ecosystems that sustain us.
Students from Lingnan Dr Chung Wing Kwong Memorial Secondary School on their annual City Cleanup.
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