Sustainable Living Hong Kong

Once upon a time, when I was small, I woke up in bed to find a rat approaching my hand. I flicked it off the bed, ran out to tell my parents, only to find a commotion in the kitchen, where this menace’s cousins and friends were having a party and driving the humans there crazy.

We were not the only household in that building to suffer the invasion though, and after complaints from several families the caretaker brought back a few cats that were given the job of patrolling the ground floor area in return for food. They did such a good job that, for added insurance, my family adopted a tabby to man our flat too.

Ordinary, local cats are extremely good at pest control, as many a food shop or stall owner would tell you. Some are so good at their job, and so lucky to be adopted by dried seafood shops, that they are regularly rewarded with bites of conpoy of the most expensive variety.

But there are far more unlucky ones than lucky ones. They live in rundown areas where food is scarce and they are subject to abuse all the time. The SPCA and its volunteers run the Cat Colony Care Programme to keep their numbers down so they do not cause a nusiance nor become a burden on the dedicated carers who feed them everyday.

Learn more about the programme and help these cats, by clicking on the cat image to the right to purchase the book and/or make a donation. Think about adopting a cat too.

If we need further evidence that the government will not take the lead in addressing climate change in any real way, this is it: Baltic peat moss spread all over a flower bed in a public park.

Here we are fretting over our mountain of waste, much of it food waste that can be treated and used as compost, and where and what does the Leisure & Cultural Services Department – you know, the one that gives us those artificial turf pitches – use to grow its flowers and shrubs? This is peat moss extracted from wetlands in northern Europe which have served as carbon sinks for thousands of years, until the horticultural industry sold gardeners the idea that it is a good growing medium and proceeded to destroy these wetlands, in the process releasing the sequestered carbon, to make its profit.

And here we have the LCSD buying peat moss from the Baltic region, which has to be transported half way round the world to be used in an East Asian public park. How much transportation emissions is added to the amount released by extraction of the peat moss? I guess that depends on just how much of the stuff the LCSD is using all over Hong Kong.

One university that has installed a biodigester on its campus to turn food waste from its food and beverage outlets into compost says it produces enough compost in one day to cover all its landscaping for one month. This is a campus that, for all its greenery, is still pretty much covered in concrete though. Imagine the surplus compost being taken up by LCSD. Imagine, in fact, all the compost that can be made out of Hong Kong’s food waste being used to fertilise the few organic farms we have as well as to rehabilitate the agricultural land that has been ruined by years of abuse. We can then improve Hong Kong’s food security, but no, the government wants to seize the land and build more housing, choosing not to tackle the unsustainable small house policy while inflating its population forecast.

Nobody in government really understands climate change beyond spinning its efforts to achieve “sustainable development”.  Worse yet, it’s not only ruining Hong Kong; it’s ruining the ecosystem in northern Europe too.

There’s an elderly Hong Kong man who’s spent his life eating all the fatty foods Hong Kongers love while exercising very little if at all. After a mild heart attack, he’s been confronted with the stark reality: he will have to undergo angioplasty to avoid having another heart attack, but he also suffers from kidney disease and the intravenous contrast dye used for the procedure may compromise his kidney function further.

There could be few better analogies to our planet’s predicament than this very real tale.

Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have passed the 400 parts per million mark, which effectively means it’s no longer possible to keep future temperature increases to under 2°C. The prediction now is for average global temperature to rise by 4°C, but if it gets even worse, we’d be looking at 6°C.

The world needs its own angioplasty, but it’s not ready to pay the price for getting rid of the excess fat in its arteries. It doesn’t want to curtail the travel industry, the aviation emissions associated with which account for over half of Hong Kong’s carbon footprint. Nor does it want to reform the manufacturing sector so that excessive energy need not be burned to produce goods that consumers must be cajoled into buying. It has been bullied into not reforming the financial sector, which has put its stakes in maintaining a fossil fuel-dependent world. How else do you account for the way stock markets work? Oil stocks are rising and people are happy – as happy as the elderly man eating his roast pork lunch.

Thing is, the world doesn’t really want to deal with climate change because doing so will affect its kidneys; ie. the economy.

As I write, the said elderly Hong Kong man is probably on his way to another hospital for a second opinion, desperate to be told that everything will be fine if he just keeps popping all the pills that temporarily alleviate the symptoms even as he continues to get worse. Kind of like all these people going round the conference circuit talking about how measures to improve energy efficiency will sort out climate change.

The truth of the matter is, unless angioplasty is done, he will die. He will have to accept that he has allowed his kidney function to deteriorate to such an extent that the only option now is to undergo regular dialysis following the operation. He can’t hope to get back to the hale-and-hearty days of yore because he never took care of himself. He thought he could abuse his body and everything would still be fine – like we thought we could abuse the planet without consequences.

Too late.

Having worn the ancient jeans to shreds, I recently bought some replacement from a retailer with a long-term code of ethics.

When the factory collapse occurred in Bangladesh, I checked the label again and – gulp – confirmed that they were indeed made in that country. Can this company’s compliance managers be expected to have really done their job in ensuring fair and healthy working conditions for their suppliers’ workers?

The problem with today’s consumerism is that people buy new stuff constantly and throw them away when they’re still practically new, adding to the mountain of waste. In the meantime, natural resources from the water and good soil needed to grow the cotton for the clothing to the metals and rare earth elements needed to make the electronic gadgets run out. And yet we’re told the world’s economy has to be propped up by consumption; that China, for example, can’t keep growing unless it stimulates domestic consumption.

So what we have is a system finetuned to produce goods at maximum efficiency and lowest cost, whatever the cost to the workers or the ecosystem. Note that the aim is not to provide employment, but to drive ever-growing profit.

You could have 100 workers making good-quality clothing, at a rate of, say, 50 pieces a day, because they are attending to every detail themselves, or you can have 100 workers arranged in a production line, assembling fast fashion at a thousand times that rate. The first set of workers are too slow though, so the amount they make won’t turn a great profit. The approach therefore has long been to break up a product into a thousand different manufacturing processes to be sub-contracted to different factories so that more can be made by extremely bored and poorly paid workers assigned to repetitive tasks making the buttons, the zips, the sleeves, etc, in such quantity that higher profits can only be generated by brainwashing consumers into believing they must constantly get something new.

Sub-contracting only ever works where specialist knowledge or skills are needed on an irregular basis. For example, certain industrial plants require ducts that must be welded by specialist welders to ensure the joints have the integrity to cope with the plant’s critical operation reliably, so it makes sense for the contractor building the plant to sub-contract the job of assembling those ducts to a team of specialist welders.

Where the input of knowledge or skills is needed on a regular basis, sub-contracting is just a means of exploitation. For example, every residential building is more or less the same, but contractors typically sub-contract most of the tasks to others in order to keep their payroll down. It’s no accident that the more reputable contractors are those who invest in direct labour. So, does it make sense for a telecommunications company which needs a team of maintenance workers to regularly service customers’ connections to “outsource” its maintenance work, or for a container terminal operator that needs crane operators on a daily basis to have them work for contractors instead?

I once bought a pair of trainers that were made by fairly-paid workers in Portugal using natural materials. They were quite a few times more expensive than the average sweatshop-made trainers, but they’re of sufficiently good quality for me to be still using them today. Unfortunately, price alone doesn’t always translate into better treatment for workers; it can – and in Hong Kong always does – mean higher rent, while the workers responsible for making them still get paid a pittance.

For as long as rampant sub-contracting is practised around the world, the wealth gap will just widen more and more. Hong Kong’s Gini co-efficient, by the way, is now up to 0.509 (see Census & Statistics Department table below, from their “Household Income Distribution in Hong Kong” report.

Wow, have you heard? Sinopec has developed a ‘green’ aviation biofuel.

The biofuel has been successfully tested on a short flight and is made up of waste cooking oil and… palm oil. Scale it up to feed an expanding fleet of aircraft and you’d be looking at chopping down all the rainforest in Borneo to make way for palm oil plantations.

The alarm over the use of palm oil for biofuels was raised a good six years ago, but profits of course always trump ecology. And it’s such an easy sell when people are so uninformed; they just have to say palm oil cuts greenhouse gas emissions and most people would nod their heads and say, good, they’re going green.

It’s like the clever people in the UK government now opposing the ban on pesticides that have been killing off bees in their millions. Heeding the advice of the pesticide manufacturing lobby, the government claimed that the effects of the pesticides were uncertain. Thankfully there are more ecologically aware souls in Europe, who have just voted in favour of a two-year moratorium. In China, who dare say palm oil’s no good?

Before long, someone’s going to take a palm-oil-fuelled flight to Indonesia to see the famed orang-utans. As the flight comes in to land, they’ll discover palm plantations stretching as far as the eyes can see. Upon landing, they’ll discover that the few orang-utans they can still see are – in a zoo.

When the old masters of HSBC commissioned the development of the bank’s new headquarters in Central, they were advised by fung shui experts to maintain the flow of sea breeze through the public area at ground level if the new building was to bring prosperity.

Well, judging by the way they have used the clever gates to prevent any protests by striking dock workers camping outside Cheung Kong Centre from spilling over to their HQ, the bank’s fortunes may take a turn for the worse.

They are complying with government requirement to maintain public access by leaving a narrow opening at the two ends of the public area, but the sea breeze has been shut out. The result is a major loss of natural ventilation in a very built-up part of the business district. This is bad for air quality in the area, which will also become hotter when summer arrives. If the fung shui experts are right, this is also bad for the bank itself.

Scientists have just made a startling discovery: you can get rid of bedbugs by spreading kidney bean leaves around the bedroom.

The microscopic hooks on the leaves snare the bugs, trapping them. Eastern Europeans have traditionally got rid of the pests by spreading the leaves in their bedrooms then collecting them along with the trapped bugs to be set on fire outdoors.

Wow, what a great, organic method of pest control! Let’s grow some kidney beans and save the leaves for trapping bedbugs. Talk about win-win: we get a healthy, plant-based source of iron aplenty and get to remove these pests without using chemicals or expensive fumigation services.

But no, the scientists want to replicate the leaves’ pest control function artificially. I guess the idea is that then they can patent it, mass produce it and sell it for a nice profit.

Biomimicry is one of those buzz words you hear talked about a good deal on things like TED talks. The idea is to learn from the ways nature solves problems and then engineer artificial versions that in theory will work just as well but on different scale or for different purposes. For example, researchers are seriously looking at developing materials that are as strong as a spider’s web, so a real-life Spiderman (who would have to be bionic) could actually pull a train to a stop using it.

But aren’t things going a bit far? When a natural material is already available for a certain purpose, why waste so many research hours developing artificial versions that consume energy and resources? Like all those pricey “air purifiers” you can buy from any appliance shop. Please, you can go to the florist instead and buy yourself some “air-cleaning plants” for a fraction of the cost and clean up your home/office without wasting any electricity at all. The classic is an “invention” which basically consists of a fan that sucks dirty air into a machine containing a real plant inside; the dirty air is cleaned up by the plant’s roots and released as fresh air. Apparently, it even won an “innovation” award. Genius.

We’re not really learning from nature are we? We’re just exploiting it for profit.

Margaret Thatcher passed away after suffering a stroke, it was announced yesterday, so let’s mourn the person, but not the legacy.

The former British prime minister who famously said that “there is no such thing as society” made sure she was right by doing the best she could to dismantle everything that helped maintain social cohesion. And no, I’m not quoting her out of context. Further on in the 1987 interview that yielded that quote, she said, “people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations.”

What she didn’t realise was that the kind of policies she pursued made it increasingly difficult for people to look after themselves so that they were forced to turn to the government for help. She believed her neoliberal policies of privatisation and deregulation would enable everyone to get ahead, like herself, the shopkeeper’s daughter turned prime minister. The reality is that these policies, if anything, have destroyed social mobility, allowing the rich to get stupendously richer while the living standard of the rest is progressively eroded as the former sucks more and more wealth out of society for their private gain.

Remember the “big bang”, the deregulation of the financial markets that was so celebrated in her day? It set the trend that has been directly responsible for the financial crisis of 2008, from which the world has yet to fully recover.

In Hong Kong, all the coverage will revolve around her negotiations with Deng Xiaoping over the city’s handover, but how have her neoliberal policies affected Hong Kong?

We are constantly fretting over the wealth gap but can’t seem to come up with anything but stop-gap measures, because we’ve failed to realise that neoliberalism is the root cause of it.

Her success at the Falklands War suppressed the voice of those whose lives were ruined by her policies. By the time she gave way to Tony Blair via John Major, her neoliberalism had become such entrenched orthodoxy that Blair’s New Labour had to become pro-business in order to win support and funding.

Her passage should mark the end of the neoliberal era. It’s time for governments to restore social cohesion through policies that recognise that, yes, there is such a thing as society, which is formed by interdependent communities fragmented by the draining of their wealth into the pockets of the super-rich.

Why, after all, do you think the container port workers are still on strike? Their ultimate boss is the richest person in Hong Kong and ranks 8th on Forbes’ list of billionaires, and yet their salary increases have hardly kept up with inflation. They toil 12-hour days up on their cranes while their ultimate boss is strolling on a golf course. A local shopkeeper is a hundred times more likely to be kicked out by a landlord who wants to get ten times more rent from a retail chain, than to see his daughter become the chief executive of Hong Kong.

Bird flu, swine flu, mad cow disease….

What’s the solution then? More culling of innocent animals bred in horrendous conditions just to meet the global demand for meat?

Whenever it is suggested that we should eat less meat if not forgo it altogether, some clever soul would point out that our ancestors were hunter-gatherers who ate a mix of meat and plants. Well yes. They had to hunt or search for days on end, either for half-eaten carcasses left by other animals, or animals that they could kill themselves. They did not eat animals everyday, at every meal.

Today we are eating meat on such a scale that we’ve forgotten that animals are living beings and not manufactured goods that can be turned out on a production line. Infectious diseases spread rapidly in cities because of the density of urban populations, which makes it so easy for viruses to jump from one person to another. For the luckier ones who don’t have to live 20 to a tiny room, there are at least walls to act as barriers between neighbours. No such luck for the animals bred for human consumption. They are packed in close quarters at factory farms where viruses happily cross from one victim to another, quickly mutating in the process.

To turn a quicker profit, these animals are fed anything from antibiotics to steroids so they can grow faster, leaner, whatever.

When are we going to learn that animals are not a utility there to satisfy our unhealthy obsession with meaty diets? They are part of the ecosystem, not a factory product. Permaculture recognises this; that’s why, instead of promoting vegetarianism, its idea is to develop farming methods that respect the way nature works. Chickens eat the worms on the vegetables patch, their droppings going to fertilise the soil and feeding the fish in the pond so that a balance of animal protein and vegetables can be harvested. The chickens can roam around, the vegetables are grown organically and the soil is not degraded by artificial fertilisers.

Instead, we are making ourselves sick eating too much meat while the planet runs out of resources. Someone’s making lots of money though, from pushing meat products produced in conditions that are conducive to disease.

Willful ignorance can be lethal. While the government and various organisations are pushing green building and showing off landscaped roofs every chance they get, the Leisure and Cultural Services Department has apparently been quietly replacing natural sports pitches with artificial ones.

There was a story in the Post last Thursday (March 21) about artificial turf causing more injuries to players who also kick up bits of the rubber substrate, thereby releasing the heavy metals and other substances they contain. What the story doesn’t say, even though it mentioned that the temperature of artificial pitches is higher than natural ones, is their contribution to the urban heat island effect. So add a few green roofs and plant a few more trees; slowly but surely, LCSD is cancelling out their cooling effect or making things worse by introducing more artificial pitches.

Why is the department doing this? Lower maintenance cost, of course. But just as society continues to fret over the plight of those on low income, wouldn’t it be nice if the government could, instead of handouts or welfare payments, create some positions for gardeners? They can tend to the natural pitches and retain some dignity for doing valuable work. The trouble with the government, though, is that it loves throwing money at capital assets but baulks at spending the tiniest amount on recurrent costs – which usually involve human beings. Thus we have spanking new roads and artificial pitches that, by the way, don’t hold any water like natural pitches do and are therefore more prone to flooding, which will be more often thanks to heavier downpours associated with climate change.

Residents are right to be concerned. It’s not just the potential injuries associated with use of artificial pitches; their districts will get hotter as well as more artificial pitches replace natural ones.