With the arrival of the hiking season, TrailWatch has arranged a Waste Audit activity each month from Oct to Dec 2021 to visit three popular outlying island trails. While enjoying the island scenery, we can also clean up the trails. At our first event on 16 Oct, a group of 15 people joined us, geared up and ready to go to Peng Chau that morning.
The event happened to take place just after two typhoons in a row. We picked up a lot of rubbish from the trail shortly after we started. More than 70 plastic bottles were collected from the grass area next to the trail and seven bags were soon filled with different types of rubbish. Our guess is that the rubbish usually hidden amongst the trees were swept out by the strong winds and onto the paths.
We reuse the toilet roll plastic bags for our Waste Audit event.
Participants used the photo-taking function of the TrailWatch App to record rubbish while Route Tracking.
https://www.trailwatch.hk/incidents/5100
We found large household appliances and bikes being abandoned along our hiking route, and the participants tried out the Incident Report function.
During the latter part of the activity when we walked along Peng Yu Path, we stopped by the beaches to clean-up some of the shore. Participants kept bending down to pick up styrofoams, plastic bottles, even toys, and much more. They cleaned up one of the beaches that was covered by rubbish in less than half an hour.
Briefing before the beach clean-up; the left side of the beach was full of marine debris.
In less than half an hour, the Participants had cleaned up the beach and looked much better than before.
We recorded the number and brands of the plastic bottles to support the Plastic Bottle Brand Survey.
Everytime after a typhoon, the ocean returns marine debris to us humans. The coast is filled with plastic waste, which is a reflection of the serious problem of marine debris. A large amount of rubbish is single-use plastics, especially beverage plastic bottles. We hope that we can all make changes in our day-to-day life and carry on the plastic-free habit even when we are in nature.
A quick summary of the Peng Chau Waste Audit:
– 7 styrofoam boxes
– 29 bags of rubbish
– 248 beverage plastic bottles
– About 50kg of rubbish
Comments from participants:
Stacey: The event is meaningful and the organisers are friendly, I hope that I can join again.
Stella: This is my first time to participate in the Waste Audit in Peng Chau. When we were on the trail and beach, seeing the enormous amount of rubbish that we can never clean them all up, I feel like we should start from our daily life instead by practicing Take Your Litter Home and reduce waste at source.
Event record: https://www.trailwatch.hk/app/?t=activities&aid=703540
A lookback of the Waste Audit from April to July: https://www.trailwatch.hk/blog/911