The fishing industry in Hong Kong says the significance of 150 tons of plastic pellets that spilled in the wake of typhoon Vicente two weeks ago, is rapidly waning, now that the fishing ban is just over. And an industry spokesman noted that most retailers prefer selling fish caught in the wild than those from local fish farms.
Lee Choi-wah, president of the Hong Kong Chamber of Seafood Merchants, told China Daily that the plastic pellets floating on the sea surface could hardly be consumed by fish caught in the deep seas.
The fish most affected, however, would be at local fish farms, some of which are reported as having accumulation of pellets. Lee admitted the business of local fish farmers is likely to drop 20 to 30 percent until the fish are given a clean bill of health.
The Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department said on Tuesday that they found 1 gram and 0.4 gram of the plastic pellets in the stomachs of a red drum and a cobia respectively, from the five live fish samples they collected at Cheung Sha Wan fish culture zone.
The government urged the public to wash fish thoroughly and remove the internal organs before cooking.
Both shoppers and fish vendors in Tin Wan said they are not concerned much about potential danger of plastic pellets, because local freshwater fish are mostly sold on the market. “I’m not worried at all,” said Wong, a local shopper, who just bought one.
Two owners of different seafood shops, surnamed Fung and Lau, also said the business was as usual at their shops, claiming the quality of fish they sold were good.
Meanwhile, Director Paul Lam Kwan-sing of the State Key Laboratory in Marine Pollution at the City University said the polypropylene pellets in the sea won’t cause an ecological disaster and should only be considered “massive garbage” in the sea.
The pellets were in six containers that fell off a ship at the height of the typhoon last month.
Lam explained that pollutants that pellets absorbed would be higher than pollutants found in seawater, thus the pollutants might remain in marine species if they swallowed the pellets. But this is unlikely to affect the food chain or pose a threat to human health.
He said some fish and water birds may mistake the pellets for fish eggs, and he called on the government to work against time to retrieve the remaining sacks of pellets. If the sacks break, the ocean will have much more garbage which will be more difficult to recover, he said.
Secretary for Food and Health Ko Wing-man said the government has deployed more manpower from the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department and disciplined services to clean up the pellets on beaches, especially remote ones.
Ko pledged a large-scale cleanup operation when more staff are able to help, once the job of cleaning tons of toppled trees in the wake of the typhoon is complete.
“I do not want to see the fishing industry affected by the pellets, so we will help the fish farms clean up the pellets and continue to monitor the situation,” Ko said on a RTHK program on Tuesday.
He said the government would invite recycling companies to reprocess the recovered plastic pellets, to avoid creating waste.
A recycling company said it would pay HK$4,000 for a ton of pellets and could sell them at double the price after cleaning them.
Environmentalist Gary Stokes of Sea Shepherd Hong Kong said the government was prompt at cleaning the spills, and the producer Sinopec has also been actively involved in the cleanup.
China Daily Information Co (CDIC)