Philine recently went on a trip to a glass recycling unit in the New Territories. Her account is below. I’m sure a lot of people would welcome recycling bins for glass in South Lantau.
Dumper Truck Drivers Association:
On Sunday 10th October I joined the tour to the glass recycling facility, so nicely coordinated by Jo Wilson from Lamma, and April Lai – we had a full bus load to go from the ferry pier via Tai Koo to Tuen Mun. The invitation was from the “HK Dumper Truck Drivers Association”, that’s quite a name and an organisation. But the Dumper truck drivers are very concerned about the waste generated in Hong Kong and the rapid filling of landfills to capacity. For information on the growing movement for glass collection and recycling see this website: http://www.greenglass.org.hk.
Brick factory:
The place in Tuen Mun is a factory for producing bricks (non-structural, pavement application only) from waste construction materials, processed glass and concrete. The project had been seed-financed by the government and is or will soon be self supporting. They recycled 1500 tons of glass last year, and will get up to 2000 tons this year. This is minimal if you know that Hong Kong has 130 000 tons of waste glass a year… The website of the brick/stone company is: www.tiostone.com. If you plan a pavement anywhere, use these truly HK original upcycled products (the process was developed at PolyU engineering department a number of years ago).
Fun and games:
Well, apart from a bilingual sounding of information in the bus, we had a quiz at the end of the factory tour, and did win either a bag of rosellas from a Fan Ling organic farm (thanks to April who had been collecting them in the morning) or a soap made from waste materials…. and I believe some organic lip gloss in answering the questions.
We ended up spending nearly a whole day and returned by ferry….
For anyone interested I did take a lot of photographs, and could show them at one of our next TSL Friday nights….
If we can figure out logistics we could recycle glass in Mui Wo – or elsewhere in Lantau. The greenglass.org does accept more glass we were told. Another project for consideration.
Philine Bracht
Transition South Lantau 