Help Save the Sparrows

There aren't as many Eurasian Tree Sparrows around in HK

 

According to the Hong Kong Bird Watching Society, the city's sparrow population has dropped by around 30 percent in the past five years.

In May the group counted 211,100 Eurasian Tree Sparrows, the lowest figure since 305,000 were spotted in the first annual survey in 2016.

They easily adjust to living in urban areas

Pang Chun-chiu, an ornithologist with the society, said further studies needed to be carried out to find out why there has been such a drastic decline, but says it could be due to a lack of nesting space and food shortages.

"They nest in crevices which used to be abundant in a modern city like Hong Kong... [so] the glass [facades] of the buildings might reduce the nesting spaces for sparrows," he said.

Pang explained the decline of the sparrow population might also reflect a worsening urban environment in Hong Kong.

"Sparrows are a tough species, actually. They adapt to changes very quickly, and they eat a wide range of food -- from plant seeds, insects to human leftover food. There might be something getting worse here which is affecting the sparrow population," he said.

In order to protect the birds, he called on people to help, adding residential areas are their favourite spots.

For example, people should not disturb sparrows if they see them making nests in buildings during their breeding season between March and June.

They feed on seeds, insects, and also human food

It's also possible a number of the birds have died or been seriously injured from crashing into glass buildings that confuse them, though one would think they would still be able to find food with Hong Kong's garbage situation not sorted yet.

There is also the possibility of the sparrows suffering from bacterial and viral infections that can cause the failure of eggs to hatch or nesting mortality.

Hopefully these birds can be helped along to increase their survival in the coming years. These sparrows are part of the ecosystem and help with pollination, crucial for flowers, plants, trees and crops.

Hong Kong's Recycling Rate is Deplorable

Most of the discarded drink containers are from Vitasoy

Hong Kong continues to be in denial about its garbage output as an environmental group has revealed the city does not recycle any Tetra Pak drinks, most of them from local beverage producer Vitasoy.

Green Power says the company has been ignoring the problem and was deviating from a pledge to strive for socially responsible consumption and production.

Vitasoy's Lemon Tea is a popular drink in Hong Kong

 

In 2016 the environmental group launched a campaign to prove that recycling Tetra Paks was feasible.

A shocking amount of 43,000 tonnes of waste drink cartons are thrown into Hong Kong landfills each year, enough to cover 6,179 football pitches when laid flat. Almost none of them are recycled here.

Since July, Green Power set up 17 recycling stations across the city for the public to discard their drink cartons.

I have to ask -- where are these recycling stations?!

About 90,000 or almost one tonne was collected in five months.

Of the total, 74 percent were Vitasoy drinks, the rest were Swire Coca-Cola, Nestle, Kowloon Dairy and Trappist Dairy.

Nestle drinks can be found in Tetra Paks

Green Power says the government needs to legislate a "producer responsibility scheme" for drinks cartons, which would make producers pay for collection and recycling. There are already such schemes in place for plastic bags, waste electronic appliances and glass bottles, and soon for plastic bottles. It just means consumers will have to pay more for these drinks.

The Tetra Paks can be recycled by placing them in what looks like a giant blender with water and churning it into a pulp, where aluminum and impurities will be sorted out. Then the pulp is sold as a raw material to the mainland or Southeast Asia.

A company called Secure Information Disposal Services will be setting up a 20,000 sq ft drinks carton recycling facility at the Science Park in Yuen Long Industrial Estate.

Production is expected to begin in mid-2019 and will handle up to 2 tonnes per day. The biggest challenge is collection and logistics, which is why Green Power is hoping the onus will be on drinks producers like Vitasoy to pitch in to collect discarded drinks boxes and transport them to the recycling facility.

In response, a spokesman for Vitasoy said the firm would continue to promote the development and adoption of cartons with a better environmental performance, including those made with renewable and responsibly-sourced materials, so long as it did not compromise food safety or the needs of suppliers.

What about going back to using glass bottles for drinks?

It's a very weak reply that doesn't even begin to address environmental issues in Hong Kong. As a local producer one would think the company would have a moral obligation to think about recycling but without any prodding from the government, it's not going to happen anytime soon.

Until we find a more viable option, what about going back to the glass bottles filled with milk -- we're nostalgic for the past anyway!

Number of the Day: 14 Million Umbrella Bags

When it rains, umbrella bags are quickly distributed and end up in the trash

All this rain in Hong Kong this summer has led to green groups to estimate how many of those plastic umbrella sleeves are distributed everyday, and they have come up with the number of 14 million from June to September.

According to Greeners Action, around 90 percent of the 53 shopping malls, commercial buildings, and government facilities around town distributed the plastic covers during the rain because they wanted to keep the floors dry and prevent people from slipping.

The environmental group calculated on average 288 of these long narrow plastic bags were given out every 45 minutes. Around 7 percent of the venues had staff specifically handing out the bags even if tenants or shoppers didn't want them.

"People use these bags only when they enter the property and discard them when they leave. Time of use is short but the waste they generate is serious," says Greeners Action assistant project manager Yip Chui-man.

"Whether it's the property [management] or the public, both sides need to take a further step and reduce the use of these bags."

Yip said the buildings could either have umbrella racks, floor mats, or recycling bins available, or even use a different floor material to prevent slipping.

The last point is definitely true. Landlords like to have shiny floors, but they are the hardest to maintain. A lot of manpower is used to clean them, especially marble floors and polish them. Why not be practical and safe by using alternative floor materials?

When it comes to these umbrella covers, there is pretty much no choice but to use them especially when building staff are standing by and expecting you to use them. In this case I use them and keep the bag until I get home... but then what? It still ends up in the trash.

There has to be another way to deal with this situation -- to balance out the need to keep floors relatively dry and concerns about the environment...

Think Tank Avoids Real Issues

Tung Chee-hwa giving a speech at an Our Foundation Hong Kong event

Hong Kong has a lot of think tanks. They are either run by academics or politicians, the latter of which have some kind of agenda attached to them.

For example, Our Hong Kong Foundation was started by former Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa. Given his connections with Beijing, one can imagine what this think tank's slant is.

Grandpa Tung -- bless him -- is still trying to help solve the city's problems, but he's not really looking at the heart of the issue.

Eva Cheng (third frm left) is executive director of the think tank

He has hired former Amway executive Eva Cheng Kam-fun as executive director of the foundation, but how can someone who did multilevel marketing -- in beauty and health -- know how to tackle Hong Kong's biggest concerns in housing, education, employment and the environment?

However, the think tank seems to believe that inspiring a new generation of scientists and innovators is the solution, organizing Innotech Expo 2016 that starts on Saturday to October 1 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.

Is this another way for Hong Kong's elite to try to distract youth from the main issues at hand (and doing a poor job of it), or does the pro-establishment body really believe technology is the answer?

The real problem is that the Hong Kong government is completely out of touch with the problems average locals are facing. Housing prices are still far out of reach of most people, and now first-time buyers are stuck buying microflats that are less than 200 square feet. How does that give anyone a sense of dignity?

Where does the government plan to house people like her?

And why are there two main supermarket chains that basically have the same prices? From 1996 to 2000 there was a French hypermarket called Carrefour that entered the market, but mysteriously suppliers refused to deliver products to its stores. Something fishy was going on there... As a result customers lose and for the most part are stuck paying Wellcome and ParknShop prices for average products.

Why is the government not helping the poor and instead spending lavishly on large infrastructure projects that have little meaning or use to Hong Kong? Many are dreading when the Hong Kong-Macau-Zhuhai bridge opens and seeing a flood of people coming over.

The latest report on the poor is that the government is now cracking down on illegal flats, many of which are in industrial buildings, thus evicting many people on or below the poverty line. Where are they going to go? Does the government even have a plan in place for the thousands of people who are forced to live like this because there isn't enough social housing for them?

Even more bizarre is that the government has so much money in its coffers and yet it cannot or will not house the poor, instead making them fend for themselves. It treats them as if they did not work hard enough, but for many, economic circumstances have made them barely able to eke out a living.

Hong Kong is not a social welfare place, so why would the government think the poor just want to leech off its money?

And why be so stingy about the money it gives to the elderly? Meanwhile the health care system, while equitable, doesn't have enough staff, many top doctors and nurses lured into the private system. In about 15 years there will be a lot of people growing old -- is Hong Kong prepared for the impending onslaught?

Then there's pollution and the environment, where the government isn't doing enough to encourage recycling let alone telling people to consume less. Oh wait. The city is dependent on consumerism. Setting up a task force with Guangzhou on dumping marine refuse isn't really going to solve the problem of garbage washing up on our shores either.

I could go on and on. Our Hong Kong Foundation thinks if young people got jobs in the technology sector then everything will be solved. How about trying to tackle some of the above mentioned issues? That would make all of us a bit happier.

Incompetent Leadership

Chi Tak Public School in Wong Tai Sin has been left vacant for years

Ah, the incompetency of the Hong Kong government continues.

People are complaining about how buying a flat is out of the reach of many young people, and so the government has suggested perhaps it's time to develop currently forested areas in the New Territories that are supposed to be protected.

Many disagree, while others, out of greed or necessity back the idea.

However, an audit report has found of the 234 vacated schools listed in the Education Bureau's system that was set up in 2005, 105 of them continue to be unused, and another 14 weren't even registered.

Also around 80 percent of the 234 schools are primary schools.

"This is an obvious serious breach of duty on the government's part. They always say Hong Kong has a shortage of land... yet what they are doing is wasting precious public resources," said Democratic Party chief executive Lam Cheuk-ting, who has been advocating for re-purposing empty school sites.

Either these sites should be reopened because there are so many mainland Chinese students coming putting pressure on schools by the border, or they should be redeveloped for possible low-income housing.

The government doesn't do enough to tackle food waste

Why is the government letting these places be neglected? The audit report was also not impressed at how the authorities were keeping track of the vacant schools, and recommended the vacant ones be used as soon as possible.

And then the Environment Bureau has had its knuckles rapped by government auditors, who said the bureau hasn't done enough to deal with food waste in a timely manner, not is it accurate in projecting into the future. Sounds like Financial Secretary John Tsang Chun-wah has the same problem...

Food waste has actually risen 13 percent in the past decade and the government is inching its way towards charging for waste disposal, eight years behind the original target.

Talk about major procrastination!

The bureau was also criticized for overstating how much a food waste treatment pilot plant in Kowloon Bay could process, and significantly underestimating how much the first phase of an organic waste treatment facility on Lantau Island would cost.

As a result the delays have just literally added more garbage in the city's landfills.

Interestingly the Correction Services Department and Hospital Authority have the highest amounts of food waste, more than the city's per capita average. The amount of food waste in prisons ranged from 0.02kg to 1.61kg per day, and at hospitals it was 0.06kg to 0.58kg daily.

Undersecretary for the Environment Christine Loh

In 2013, Hong Kong generated 5.49 million tonnes of solid waste, of which two-thirds went to municipal landfills, the rest to recycling. About 25 percent of all solid waste is food waste.

Say... isn't Christine Loh Kung-wai the Undersecretary for the Environment? When she set up Civic Exchange in 2000, the think tank held the government accountable for its actions (or lack of) with regards to the environment...

The government's lack of action on these two important areas just illustrates its incompetency, that it really has no idea what it should be doing, or that it doesn't care.

It obviously is not serving Hong Kong people, which is what we are paying it to do. It's not that the government lacks money or access to intelligent experts. It just seems to refuse to do what is best for the city and its residents.

Which is why people feel the government is acting more in the interests of Beijing than Hong Kong...

Fact of the Day: Hong Kong's Trashy Behaviour

Why is Hong Kong's waste output increasing each year and not decreasing?

Us Hong Kong people dump a lot of garbage.

Last year, an average of 14,859 tonnes of solid waste was thrown out every day, an increase of 3.8 percent from 2013. Most of it was a 10 percent increase in construction waste, according to the latest Environmental Protection Department statistics.

So the amount of municipal solid waste dumped in landfills increased 2.5 percent from an average of 9,547 tonnes per day in 2013 to 9,782 tonnes last year. This kind of waste is generated from domestic, commercial and industrial sectors, with one-third of it being food.

Most of the garbage, at one-third, is food waste

When broken down per person, per day, it's 1.35kg last year, 1.33kg in 2013, 1.32kg in 2012 and 1.27kg in 2011.

What are we throwing out? Can't some of it be recycled? And do we have to buy so much in the first place?

This is hardly helping to meet government targets of reducing waste by 20 percent by 2017, and 40 percent by 2022.

Recycling is doing poorly at a pathetic 37 percent last year, with the quantity of recyclable materials increased by 45,000 tonnes compared to 2014. While more metals are being recycled, the collection of paper dropped by 87,000 tonnes, and plastic by 144,000 tonnes.

The government really needs to subsidize recycling in order to make people think of this as a way to reduce their waste. We can always use the recycling for other things. It's not as if the city is poor -- we have the financial resources to support this industry to make it a more viable one and create jobs as well as clean up the environment.

Not everyone uses these recycling bins property...

In the meantime, green groups are calling on the government to implement the waste charging scheme as soon as possible, though they don't anticipate it being implemented until 2018 or 2019.

However, we can already envision people dumping their trash in public waste bins to avoid being charged, and this is being done already. Perhaps the waste management department does too good of a job taking away our garbage so there isn't an appreciation for how much trash we accumulate...