“Old milk containers, juice jugs and toy cups are not the type of products usually associated with high-concept furniture, but two designers in Hong Kong have taken these and other items and upcycled them into stylish pieces of public furniture.
Tasked with creating a collection of 12 benches for the town hall in Sha Tin, in Hong Kong’s New Territories, the co-founders and design principals of HIR Studio, Howard Chung and Irene Cheng, turned to the Shing Mun River for inspiration.
‘The Shing Mun River is the soul of Sha Tin,’ says Chung, who grew up in the area. ‘But even though the river quality has improved over the years it is still quite polluted, so we really wanted to do something to help alleviate the problem of plastic pollution in the water.’
An estimated eight million tonnes of plastic contaminate the world’s oceans every year, adding to the 180 million tonnes currently swirling at sea. Ninety per cent of the plastic enters the oceans via just 10 rivers, including the Yangtze, the Indus, Yellow River, Hai River, the Ganges, Pearl River and the Mekong, in Asia (in that order).
In Sha Tin alone, more than 17.5 million pieces of plastic are dumped in the Shing Mun each year. With so much plastic in circulation, and overwhelming evidence of the damage it causes to the environment, you might think that there would be more encouragement to recycle, but Chung and Cheng faced an uphill task.
‘Plastic consumption is still high in Hong Kong. I think because this is an efficient city and everyone wants convenience, which leads to a lot of wasteful packaging,’ says Cheng. ‘But the recycling is still very primitive.’
It’s not just a lack of recycling bins and collection points (just 13 per cent of Hong Kong’s plastics are repurposed), but the quality of the plastics that can be recycled. ‘We only have one category of plastic recycling bin in Hong Kong. but in fact there are seven types of plastics that can be recycled.
View the whole story here: https://amp.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/3118127/pair-upcycle-plastic-waste-benches-public-hong-kong-town