Plastic is omnipresent in quarantine hotels for Hong Kong arrivals. Cellophane is used to wrap remote controls, pillows are wrapped in plastic bags and meals are served with plastic cutlery.
Hong Kong’s severe quarantine regulations, which are designed to stop COVID-19 at the border and in the community, have been criticised for causing economic and mental health problems. Environmentalists claim that the measures harm the environment by generating excessive garbage.
‘Every single one of the staff members here wears full PPE… the gowns, the gloves, the booties, the hats, and that’s every staff member and on every floor. The phones, you know, the remote controllers, everything’s been cellophane-wrapped’, said Hong Kong-based skincare entrepreneur Clementine Vaughan, who flew into the city on April 4 told the media from her quarantine hotel.
Hong Kong discards over 2,300 tonnes of plastic garbage every day, with just 11% of it recycled, according to official estimates, meaning the majority of it ends up in landfills. Officials were aware of an increase in disposable garbage since COVID began, as per a government spokeswoman, who urged people to live as green a lifestyle as possible.
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Edwin Lau of the local environmental group The Green Earth stated that Hong Kong’s response to COVID reflects the city’s lack of environmental consciousness. ‘People living in quarantine hotels are not confirmed cases’, Lau added, pushing the government to allow plastics from quarantine facilities to be recycled or reused.
This year, Hong Kong, one of the only cities with a zero-COVID policy, isolated tens of thousands of individuals in facilities for COVID-positive and near-contact persons. Residents told Reuters that all meals were served in plastic bags, adding to the trash problem.
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