Let’s be honest – who really wants to talk about trash? We put it into bags, carefully place it outside our homes on the allocated day and, for most of us, that’s where it ends.
But for one lady that’s where it starts. Ms. April Lai lives in Hong Kong, where the seven million inhabitants produce a staggering 13,817 tons of garbage each day. Of the 6 million produced each year, barely any goes to recycling.
To give you an idea, in 2006 about 3,000 tons of glass waste was recovered, which came to about 2% of the glass waste generated in Hong Kong that year.
Whilst the government is slowly starting to put schemes into place to deal with this problem, Ms. Lai is spending her Thursdays and Saturdays sifting through rubbish at trash collection points in the city, gathering up all the glass she can find. With a tiny team of part-time drivers and volunteers, her nongovernmental organization, Green Glass Green, manages to deliver about two to three tons of glass to Tiostone Environmental each visit.