Lantau Island

Yesterday, I went along with Kyra on a field trip for school to Lantau Island. It was a very interesting, enlightening and LONG day. The field trip was centered around "going green". I don't remember if I had included this information in a previous blog or not, but air pollution is a significant problem here. Every day, Hong Kong Island posts the API (Air Pollution Index) and if it is over 100, the kids with asthma-related issues have to stay inside for recess times throughout the school day. The first week the kids were in school, the API was over 100 three out of the five days. Obviously, this is a significant issue here. Also, the three landfills that exist here in Hong Kong are nearing capacity. So, there is discussion to possibly build incinerators to burn the trash, which would obviously only contribute to the air pollution problem.

So, for the field trip, we went to Lantau Island, which is the biggest island of Hong Kong. In fact, it is twice the size of Hong Kong Island itself. We went to a beach that is not taken care of by the government and spent an hour picking up trash. We collected 7 big bags full of debris on a very small section of beach. At the same time, we continued to watch more trash float up on shore from the water. Kyra could not get over the amount of garbage. She asked me several times if they had set it up for us for something to clean up, like as an example of what trash could do.

We then hiked up the side of a mountain to an "Eco home" to learn about organic gardening and more about the 3Rs: Recycle, Reuse, Reduce. We learned some very interesting facts, only a few of which I can remember, because if you know me at all you've heard me complain about the loss of memory cells! One thing that stuck with me is that in just China, every year they use 23 million trees just to make disposable wooden chop sticks. That just amazed me so obviously it stuck with me.

I was hoping to attach a couple photos of our field trip, but I took them with my new cell phone, which I don't know exactly how to work yet. Hopefully, I will have a chance today to figure out how to get the pics to my computer. It doesn't help that it is Windows-based and I'm on a Mac. So...it might be a bit of a process :)