Documentary records couple’s six-day Hong Kong coasteering trash tour
- The Loop follows Esther Roling and Paul Niel as they coasteer around Hong Kong Island in 2017
- They were amazed at the amount of trash washed up on the coastline and mapped 163 rubbish hotspots
“I’ve collected some unusual items on clean ups over the years but today’s was a new level of odd,” says Esther Roling, co-founder of Hong Kong’s Adventure Clean-up Challenge, an annual one-month event with a mission to clear hard-to-access coastal areas of rubbish.
“I was with a group at Lap Sap Wan on Cape D’Aguilar [in the southeast of Hong Kong Island] and we discovered a cremation urn. Luckily there were some government officials there cleaning up, so we handed it to them.”
Roling says the area had so much rubbish and built up polystyrene that the beach was springy to walk on. In 2015 the bay made headlines when a WWF-HK study estimated the weight of the litter at Lap Sap Wan was 185 tonnes with about 12 million individual pieces of litter.
Sadly, Dutch-born Roling is accustomed to such horror stories.
