Please take a look at this video:
http://vimeo.com/46594524

Or this facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sea-Shepherd-Hong-Kong/180466728631294

How about our beaches? Are they alright? I went to Tai Wan To beach in the morning of T10 and it was still fine by then, how about now? Anyone knows?

It varies from day to day, depending on the wind (blowing floating plastic in) and rain (washing it from land out to sea).

Before the typhoon there were some awful days for plastic.
Since, it's been not bad.

RTHK today:
58,000 kg of plastic pellets recovered

04-08-2012

The Government says it has so far collected more than 58,000 kilogrammes of plastic pellets after several containers were blown off a ship while Typhoon Vicente was battering Hong Kong at the end of last month. 13,000 kilogrammes of the pellets have been recovered from beaches and around 45,000 from the sea.
The Food and Environmental Hygiene Department says the plastic pellets are not toxic, and they haven't affected water quality.
The Marine Department says it is continuing work to collect more of the pellets.

That is a challenge for beach cleaning groups! I saw lots of them on Coleman’s beach and was wondering what were they and where from. Hard to collect.
Generally the influx of litter is a disaster. It looks like the Govt. is not much interested in dealing with this issue - aesthetics is not a concern; who would pay money for policing the cargo ships and fisherman boats, or e.g. providing on-sea collection from ships to beautify the beaches to please few hiking enthusiasts. I suppose this is not just aesthetics but the bureaucratic perception of the problem may be like that. Some environmental groups do a great job but this is probably just an educational value. The amount of litter they pick up (even though sometimes impressive heaps) is just an unnoticeable fraction of the waste in the sea. Usually on the next day the beach is covered with plastics again.
Discharge of toxic fluids is covered by some regulation. I could not find however any law regarding littering (may be did not search deep enough).

Tung O still have many of them.

my Chinese report: http://www.inmediahk.net/%E9%A6%99%E6%B ... 4%E9%87%8D
map: https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ll=22.1 ... urce=embed
photo gallery: http://www.flickr.com/photos/inmediahk/ ... 896053954/

I just looked closer to the RTHK info:
...The Food and Environmental Hygiene Department says the plastic pellets are not toxic, and they haven't affected water quality. ...

This exactly the understanding of bureaucrats. The video tells sometrhing else. Also, other studies show plastics grind to a very fine particles that are very harmful to the whole life at the coasts.

This picture was taken early morning today at Tai Wan To. I had tried to clean a bit and will do it again tomorrow (also met a man from outside who was there cleaning for hours in the afternoon). Just hope more Lamma residents will come and give a hand!

I will go to Tung O tomorrow to see if I can help clean a bit.

I too go to the beach or hike every morning without fail regardless of weather.

It's seasonal to a certain extent, the amazing amount of crap that washes up on these beaches.

Education. Resources. Etc.. are needed. We can clean up the crap until the cows come home. And I'm getting a tad tired of cleaning up everyone else's shit basically.

HK Government should make more of an effort. Enough money in the coffers.

Jeez.. Lamma Island and Yui Lai Fan still haven't cleaned up the crap on cable road since the Typhoon 10 and that was almost two weeks ago.

Think Yui Lai Fan should do what's she paid to do... clean up the island, give the wonderful LAP SAP ladies a HUGE pay rise, and do something.

Personally I'd like to take YLF to any of the beaches in times like this. 'refrain from rubbing her face in death fish, and side stepping syringes and say "Hey.... councillor... HK is now a part of China.. and this is an environmental disaster. Do something!! Or at least bloody help the community that are trying to do something.

Am I fighting a losing battle??

I could see with my own eyes, in the end of seventies, the municipal dump being pushed by dozers over the cliff into the sea…. Baltic Sea near Copenhagen!
If this was possible there and then, I think is very likely it is happening up the Pearl River, this or similar way of disposing of rubbish. It is maybe not right to speculate like that yet taking the tons of floating litter it cannot come just from careless tourists throwing cans into the sea. Also the content of the litter indicates typical municipal dump.
Plus thousands of cargo ships a year mooring or anchoring here or just passing by. I suspect they dispose the daily waste the easiest way – over the board. That must amount to a volume of small city municipal waste. May be I am blaming the marine community unjustly. I am very curious how it is organized on ships? Is it at all? Is there any collection at the container terminals, or on the sea, provided? How the big shipment companies deal with disposal? Is there any monitoring of ships’ behavior? Any penalties? A drone plane armed with air-sea missiles would help.

RTHK 5 July 12
The Environment Secretary, Wong Kam-sing, has said almost half of a one 150-tonne cargo of plastic pellets which spilled into the sea during a typhoon two weeks ago has now been cleaned up from the territory’s waters and beaches.
Mr Wong said some of the pellets had drifted into fish farms, but initial assessments had shown little negative effect.
He also called on volunteers to avoid going to beaches on Lamma Island for fear of distburbing turtles which have recently been laying eggs.

The good side is we will have 75 tons of Hello Kitty gadgets less this year. They would end up on the beaches anyway. So, if collected from the beaches in form of pellets makes a clear saving on energy for processing.

Over the weekend, a Reuters story was syndicated around the world - carrying dramatic pictures of Lamma beaches ankle deep in plastic pellets. Was Lamma really affected that badly (I'm out of HK at the moment)?

Here's one of their pics
http://www.trust.org/alertnet/multimedi ... 4992409773

I haven't seen any at all myself, at Hung Shing Yeh or Yung Shue Wan anyway.

I thought the main problem was on Lantau.

would someone ask Roz to explain more what she said in the fb:

Roz Keep we found 40 bags in Sham Wan Lamma. Reported to Sea Shep. FEHD cleaning the beach on Tuesday according to AGFD people stationed on beach.

FEHD cleans the beach every Tuesday?
FEHD cleaned the beach last Tuesday but not found 40 bags?

thank Roz

Just heard from the news Tung O is affected. The pellets went inside spaces between rocks. Volunteers need to use spoon and hands to get them out.

Photos:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/inmediahk/sets/72157630896053954/
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.338183079599577.80175.100002236626089&type=3

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Well, the Lamma story has now reached Time Magazine

http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/08/07/hon ... s-of-them/

Interesting that the media within HK focus on DB; the international coverage on Lamma.

FEHD and AFCD cleaned Sham Wan this morning. I met them just outside the beach as I was not permitted to step on the beach at all. We had a nice, friendly chat, I even got some water inside the warden station and we walked over to Shek Pai Wan where they caught their own chartered boat back to Aberdeen, while heir staff stayed behind and cleaned the usual debris off the beach. Shek Pai Wan is also pellet free today, despite the large hordes of visitors coming too late today to the cleanup today with their sieves.

But the hard-to-access (low tide only, some climbing over big boulders required) rocks beyond, close to the Big Rock Island, still have a small amount of "plastic snow" or "mermaid tears" left, but the large number of all-Govt. staff probably cleaned it up today mostly, including a large number of Putonghua-speaking day labourers. Green group volunteers will come back this weekend to finish the job, but there'll be nothing left by then, except there'd be more pellets washing ashore in the next few days.

But there were basically no plastic pellets at all left at Sham Wan when the Govt. troops arrived. The non-Govt. volunteers seem t have done a great job in the last few days before any Govt, troops even arrived.

They also conformed that it's perfectly legal for pleasure boats to spend as much time as they like just outside Turtle Beach, swim, make noise, whatever, as long as they don't step on the sandy beach area where they will be warned, but never fined. Same goes for any other boats, including fishing trawlers which are also allowed as long as they don't exceed the speed limit inside Turtle Bay.

Photo gallery in progress...

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I went to Tai Wan To today for the pellets but it turned out to be pellet free.
So I ended up picking up garbage instead.

Sure they were not Sinopec-staff? Mandarin-speaking day labourers would be odd in HK.

See also:
http://badcanto.wordpress.com/2012/08/0 ... our-place/

Good comment, I was wondering about that myself, but didn't ask them about it.
Let me check my photos for any uniform logos....

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