Foley on his Soapbox

Three random observations from Mike Foley (my better half), after living in Hong Kong for almost six months.

Garbage

I’m not the greenest guy on the planet, but I’m telling you, China is heading towards a garbage crisis.  And based on the math I did in my head while waiting in line for my lunch, I think it is eventually going to be an absolute disaster.  Now, this is a government that has figured out how to control the weather, so I’m not ruling out the possibility that they are building a large rocket to shoot all the trash into space directly at the sun.  But, I doubt it.  The issue is that while it does exist in certain places, there is effectively no recycling here.  It certainly doesn’t happen in my office.  In the little bin beside my desk, there is currently two Pacific Gourmet coffee cups (I miss you Tim Hortons), about 30 sheets of paper (more on paper in a minute), a banana peel, an apple core, some saran wrap, the plastic tub for my salad, a bunch of napkins/paper towels, the plastic fork that came with my salad, and the packing my pineapple came in.  I agree I should print less research, and use a metal fork and a ceramic coffee mug.  That’s not the point.  The point is that all this stuff is going to end up in the exact same place, which I’m assuming is a big landfill somewhere.  Back to the math, I have no idea how much garbage the average Chinese person produces in a day, but I’m sure it is a couple of pounds each.  So even if everyone produces just one pound of garbage a day, that is 1.3 BILLION pounds of garbage a day.  That’s one TRILLION pounds of garbage every three years.  What the hell do you do with all that??  I’m telling you, China is heading towards a garbage crisis.  It’s scary stuff.  Somewhere out there, for no apparent reason at all, a single tear just rolled down David Suzuki’s cheek.

Paper

When I first arrived, it took me a few days to figure it out why things looked slightly different, but the size of paper they use here is A4.  It’s not that big a difference to what we use back home, but sometimes emails print out funny, and it obviously doesn’t line up perfectly with anything I brought from Toronto.  So, I looked into it, and know what I learned??  Except for the US and Canada, EVERY other country in the known universe has adopted A4 as the standard sized piece of paper.  I’m all for independence, and doing your own thing and all that, but c’mon North America.  I think we can concede this one.

Pants

I’ve never been accused of exactly been ‘fashion-forward’, but I’ve noticed a disturbing trend that is occurring in Men’s fashion in Hong Kong.  Aside from the fact that everybody’s suit pants are generally ill-fitting… WAY too tight, and usually three inches too short… there is now a movement towards going beltless.  And I’m not talking about Morty-Seinfeld-beltless-trenchcoat kind of beltless, which I can dig.  This is just like you were too lazy to put on a belt, and instead use these little straps on the side to secure your pants to your waist.  Maybe I’m just old fashioned (and am admittedly an old man), but for me, it is kind of like the super colorful sock thing…  I just think it looks stupid.

That’s it for my soapbox.