Domestic helpers tackle Hong Kong beach plastic pollution in extreme clean-up challenge
- SCMP - Alkira Reinfrank
- May 13, 2019
- 7 min read
Updated: Aug 2
Filipino Dynamos are a group of volunteers who spent their day off cleaning a remote beach on Hong Kong Island.
They are taking part in the month-long Adventure Clean Up Challenge to remove plastic trash from hard-to-reach areas.
Armed with gloves, masks and rucksacks, 10 avid hikers rappel down a lush seaside canyon using fixed ropes. The morning downpour across Hong Kong Island makes the steep descent a muddy affair, but it doesn’t slow the group nor dampen their enthusiasm.
Near the base of the canyon, one by one, the women start snaking their way along a craggy rock face; anchoring their feet in crevasses and foliage, careful not to slip into the stream below.
The dense greenery quickly opens up to a rocky inlet. But this is no leisurely day at the beach; dropping into the cove, the women get to work, kitting up and pulling out heavy-duty bags to remove the mounds of plastic, polystyrene and discarded household objects that are suffocating this remote spot.
These Filipino women work as domestic helpers, and on a recent Sunday morning are spending their only day off cleaning up this hard-to-reach beach, near Hong Kong’s surfing Mecca, Big Wave Bay.
Often overworked, underpaid and undervalued, Hong Kong’s foreign domestic helper population of 370,000 are often treated like second-class citizens. Nevertheless, this team of furiously proud women are quick to roll their sleeves up to help the city.
“I have always loved Hong Kong; it is my second home. I love the landscape and it makes me feel sad to see all this rubbish,” says Liza Avelino, who moved to Hong Kong as a helper 23 years ago to support her twin boys back in the southern Philippines. She and her friends spend most of their Sundays out in nature – hiking, coasteering, dragon boating – collecting rubbish as they go.
“Seeing this is so depressing. I get so emotional,” says Avelino, 48, looking out over the rocky beach, strewn with discarded flip-flops, cigarette lighters, bundles of fishing line and takeaway containers. “If I had all the money in the world I would get rid of this and do something about it.”
Looking across the cove, it is not hard to see that Hong Kong has an unhealthy relationship with single-use plastic. Each day the city of 7.4 million people throws away about five million plastic water bottles. Many end up in waterways, becoming part of the food chain or being washed up on beaches like this one.
Even the surrounding cliffs aren’t immune to this environmental nightmare, with unidentifiable rubbish half buried in the surrounding walls, a sign of the years of pollution build-up. With each wave comes more discarded plastic. If the women feel it is a losing battle, it doesn’t show, as each takes a different tool to pick up trash in a separate area of the beach.
They call themselves the Filipino Dynamos, and are one of six teams taking part in the month-long Adventure Clean Up Challenge, the first multidisciplinary sports competition where teams clean hard-to-reach coastal areas of Hong Kong.
Hong Kong Island has about 80km of coastline, much of which is cliffs. Many of the city’s beaches are cleaned on a regular basis through government programmes, but the vast majority of remote ones are left to be swamped by floating debris and are not easily accessible for beach clean-ups.
“It makes me feel like crying [when I see the rubbish]. In Hong Kong there are so many resources. People can make a choice not to use any plastic,” Avelino says.
Along with the Dynamos, the innovative challenge has brought together teams from the Spanish community to the corporate world, with a mission to see which group can have the greatest impact on a difficult-to-access area of Hong Kong’s coastline.
The remote nature of the six locations chosen for the challenge – including sites in Tai Tam and Lap Sap Wan, which translates to “Rubbish Bay” – mean teams must abseil, hike, kayak, coasteer or scramble to reach the locations. To undertake such tasks comes with risks, so the teams have been assigned locations based on their fitness ability and adventure expertise.
Avelino, who has scaled Mount Kilimanjaro and has reached Everest Base Camp, and her team jumped at the opportunity to explore a new part of Hong Kong, and get their feet muddy and hands dirty.
Sporting long pigtails to match her infectious enthusiasm, Avelino says she had an overwhelming number of fellow domestic helpers wanting to join the team, but she “picked the women who were capable of crawling up the rocks and who are not scared of the slippery slope”.
The clean-up challenge is the brainchild of Dutch chef Esther Röling, who along with her mountaineering husband, Paul Niel, became the first people to circumnavigate Hong Kong Island’s coastline in 2017 by combining climbing, swimming and scrambling.
The pair used the groundbreaking expedition to create Hong Kong’s first coastal pollution map using the Global Alert app, where they pinpointed “163 major trash sites” on the island.
“It was frustrating to walk along all this trash and not be able to do anything. So when we got back we had the feeling we had to do something more,” says the 42-year-old, who spotted everything from 13 fridges to countless abandoned surfboards and microwave ovens on the six-day journey.
Looking out at a pile of fridge doors, plastic barrels and scrap metal collected by the Filipino Dynamos, the nimble sportswoman admits “visible pollution has got worse [since her and Niel’s expedition] because of the big typhoon last year”.
“A lot has been spat out by the sea. While it is in the sea, people don’t see it and most likely [think it doesn’t] really impact them. But when it comes to the land, they have to make changes. It was bad two years ago and now it is still really, really bad,” says the Adventure Clean Up Challenge co-organiser.
But it is not just visible rubbish that is strangling Hong Kong’s coastline. In the past three years, the amount of microplastics in the city’s waterways has increased 11 times, according to a report carried out by Greenpeace East Asia and Education University. It is believed that most of this plastic pollution is produced locally.
“Fish eat the plastic and styrofoam and it goes into their digestive systems, and the fish most likely end up on our plates. It is a circle. It comes back to us,” Röling says.
This particular cove is suffocating in polystyrene. Small white balls, which have probably come from broken down packaging or takeaway containers commonly used in the city, pepper the beach, filling each crack and crevice. I deceivingly step on what looks like a rock covered in a dusting of the white material, only to lose my balance, as my foot sinks six inches.
The millions of polystyrene balls are proving the hardest for the Dynamo team to remove.
But they have built a barricade of driftwood and fish lines across the mouth of the stream, stopping the floating white pollutant from entering the ocean. From here they are able to use baskets to scoop up the polystyrene from the waterway.
Teams receive points not only for how many bags of rubbish they collect and the creative ways they do it, but also for how they engage with their community and educate them on the issue of coastal pollution.
Education is a crucial aspect of the challenge that Röling and her co-organiser, Sole Riestra, creator of the Ecoed environmental education app, stress.
“It is an ongoing process. Every typhoon blows all the rubbish to the coast again, that’s why the community engagement part of it is so important. The real change will come through the community engagement programme, where we change people’s mindsets and the way they look at plastic,” Röling says.
On a larger scale, Röling says it is imperative that restaurants stop the mass distribution of single-use plastics in Hong Kong, and that the government invests in an incinerator.
Getting in and cleaning up is only half the challenge. Teams must somehow get the garbage out of the locations – including the large items such as home appliances – which will require some creativity from teams that are only able to access their site via abseiling or coasteering.
This time, garbage collected will go to the landfill, but it is hoped that next year the challenge can find a way to ensure some of the waste collected can be recycled. Röling hopes the teams can remove 1,000 large garbage bags worth of trash from Hong Kong’s beaches – and says they are well on target.
Before the rain sets in on this unseasonably cold spring morning, the Dynamos have managed to fill more than 50 bags with rubbish, transporting them out with the use of a bamboo pole and strength.
But there is still much more to be done, including the somewhat impossible task of removing a fridge lodged next to a nearby sea cave. Taking a break from the clean-up, Avelino admits seeing the sheer volume of plastic thrown away by the public “makes you feel helpless”.
“But even if it is tiring work [cleaning the beach], it feels good knowing you have done something for other people, for Hong Kong and for the environment. It makes life more meaningful, it gives you purpose, and makes our day off more positive,” she says.
Though it is a competition, the Dynamos don’t mind if they don’t win. Helping preserve the environment they love is reward enough.
“Once we are done cleaning up, it is going to be very beautiful and hopefully people can come here to enjoy it. And after the clean-up my team will come here and have a picnic,” she says, with a big grin.
Adventure Clean Up Challenge runs until May 19. Follow the teams’ progress at facebook.com/adventurecleanup
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