Environmental group Greenpeace has released a study which shows that Hong Kong dumps 110,000 tonnes of garment each year, enough to cover 25,000 football fields. That’s like throwing away 1,400 T-shirts every minute. According to the report, people in Hong Kong still cannot shake off their wasteful habits despite improvements in their environmental awareness during the past 10 years. Over the past decade, Hong Kong has dumped nearly 300 metric tonnes of clothing on a daily average while the recycling rate fell to 4 per cent last year. Greenpeace released the figures on November ahead of Buy Nothing Day, an international day of protest against consumerism. Greenpeace campaigner Bonnie Tang said each Hong Kong person discarded 15 kilos of garment, the equivalent to 102 shirts. By contrast, the recycling rate in Singapore is 11 per cent, and even higher in western countries such as Britain (16 per cent) and the US (15 per cent), she said. Part of the reason for Hong Kong’s high waste rate is an import ban in mainland China and shrinking markets in Africa and Southeast Asia for used clothing, a Hong Kong newspaper quoted Leung Pui-lun, chairman of the Hong Kong General Association of Recycling Business, as saying. Tang said discarded textiles contain hazardous chemicals and heavy metals that could leak into groundwater and take years to decompose. These produce harmful greenhouse gases.
