Plastic paradise: HK's packaging problem

Hong Kong

A LITTLE girl shrieks with excitement as she strolls along the beach: "Oh look mummy. Hong Kong snow." Despite the cold snap, what she's pointing to is not a meteorological anomaly - but in fact swathes of polystyrene thrown out as rubbish.

The city is suffocating under a film of plastic: "Each day the equivalent weight of two A380 Airbus planes is discarded" in domestic waste, says Lisa Christensen, co-founder of HK Clean Up initiative.

Add to this trashed industrial and commercial plastic, and more than 2,000 tonnes of the material is thrown out daily in Hong Kong - saturating landfill sites but also clogging up country parks, coastal areas and waterways.

"For our supermarket generation the focus is on convenience, issues of pollution seem very far away," says local environmental campaigner Jo Wilson, whose daughter highlighted t…