The campaign raises awareness of the need to cut waste, with an exhibition of photos of local celebrities such as Donnie Yen and Miriam Yeung at Hysan Place
Local non-profit organisation EcoDrive and charity Hong Kong New Youth Energy Think Tank joined forces to launch education campaign Enough Plastic last week.
The campaign was launched ahead of Hong Kong’s first ever No Single Use Plastic Awareness Day, which will take place on May 30. It raises awareness of single-use plastics and encourages people to lessen unnecessary waste in the city.
Hong Kong award-winning photographer Wing Shya took pictures of 60 local celebrities, including Aaron Kwok, Donnie Yen and Miriam Yeung, to highlight the problems of single-use plastics.
Those photos will be shown in a digital exhibition at Hysan Place from May 30 to June 2. They will also be shared by the celebrities involved on their social media accounts.
“Enough Plastic [allows us] to reach the youth community through the use of social media by enlisting some of Hong Kong’s most famous faces,” one of the EcoDrive co-founders, Laura Southwood, told Young Post.
As part of the campaign, they sent schools a letter which told them how they could use less plastic in school. Some schools have shown their support by displaying posters of Big Waster, an Environmental Protection Department's mascot who kindly agreed to be one of Enough Plastic's famous faces for the campaign.
“I think the most effective way to use less plastic at school is to cut down the amount of plastic utensils available for students on campus,” said Daniel Hau Yuk-yat, 17, from SKH Lui Ming Choi Secondary School. He added that another effective method was to create a brand new class that focuses only on environmental issues and protection.
“The one-off presentations at school assemblies usually do not raise much awareness nor create any change.”
Another student from HKUGA, Joshua Cheung See-chung, 18, said his school didn’t teach them much about environmental protection. But, like Daniel, he believed that getting rid of plastic utensils would be the best way
to curb plastic use on campus.
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