Posters, presentations, coffee and celebrations!
It has been crazy. Somehow, our group pulled together two posters on a waste management policy recommendation for Hong Kong in two weeks. We were tasked to see what the holes were in policy, find out the context of a sustainability issue and confidently recommend a policy to the government. We did it, but boy was it a challenge.
I sometimes forget that not everyone in the world knows and cares about sustainable waste management. But this made it fun to work with the City University of Hong Kong students because most of them did not know much about sustainability as a whole. It made me take a step back and start from square one to understand a problem. We walked through what was happening with waste and why the city was not handling it in a way that seemed reasonable to me. On the other hand, the CityU students were mostly policy students and they had to really walk us through how their system was set up. Is this how international work is conducted? Although I have traveled for leisure to many places, I have not conducted much business outside of the US. There seemed to be a large learning curve for both sets of students on how the other set learns and goes about schools and government. I can see this really inhibiting international collaboration due to the extra effort and frustration.
I would also like to note about the sustainability of Hong Kong in general. I have so many questions for the leaders of this city on sustainability. For example, the area surrounding the Big Buddha, the largest Buddha in the world, is a ‘zero plastic bag village’ yet we got free bottles of water with our purchases. Also, the city preserves about 40% of the total land of Hong Kong for ‘country parks’ but then they practice land reclamation and dig up the ocean to create new islands. Which is better for the long-term sustainability of Hong Kong?
Overall this week has been complete madness but as it is starting to sink in, I am realizing just how much I soaked up in these two short weeks.
Till next time!
