Hong Kong is modern and progressive in many ways. A great system of public transport. Very little crime. A social safety network that seems to work well.

HK is way behind the curve, though, on recycling and other topics environmental.

This seems to be a generic “China” issue, in particular. The country seems to be in a phase of its development where nature/the environment takes a back seat to pushing the economy higher, and faster. Air/water pollution, deforestation? Whatever. Let’s build a factory!

China now is one of the smoggiest places on earth. Nearly all of its urban centers have air that Angelenos would consider awful. Hong Kong is one of those places.

Entire sections of Southeast Asia are being deforested to fuel China’s building explosion. The country is sucking up large fractions of the world’s cement and other building materials.

But HK has one really obvious issue that doesn’t seem to be in the process of being addressed.

This is the Plastic Bag Capital of the world.

I was in Beijing just a few months ago, and the government there just up and decided, “no more plastic bags,” and that was that. (One of the few up sides to living in a one-party state; when that one party has a good idea, it can be implemented in, oh, the length of time it takes to write the memo.)

But plastic bags remain, in Hong Kong, which is sorta China but not really (it’s a Special Administrative Region).

And plastic bags are everywhere.

When you shop at the market, you get your groceries in plastic bags. Much like the ones in the States — except perhaps a little bigger and a little thicker.

The fraction of people who bring their own canvas bags for groceries … is tiny. I’m not sure I’ve seen a single Chinese resident show up at the neighborhood Wellcome store with a re-usable canvas bag even once, in 2 1/2 months here.

Why? Well, as people in SoCal can tell you, you need to have that canvas bag with you at all times, because you’re not going to turn around and go get it, when you get to the head of the checkout line. And the bags don’t fold up quite as small as you wish, so they are a bit of a hassle to carry around, and you can’t “leave them in the car” because no one here has a car. The only things handy are what you carry on your person. And a canvas tote bag probably isn’t on the list.

Also, in HK, there is incentive not to use canvas — to take the plastic. Because the plastic bags are then put to subsequent uses.

As lunch bags. As trash bags, in particular. I’m guessing that the majority of the HK population lines its trash cans/baskets with plastic grocery bags. They unload the groceries,  then they stash the bags for trash usage.

Also, plastic bags are heavily used by restaurants. For takeout food. If I close my eyes, sometime in the future when I’m not living here, and think of a common street scene — a bunch of the people in that scene will have the loops of a white plastic bag in their fingers, with their takeout lunch/dinner dangling inside.

Plastic makes sense on several levels. It is cheap. And, and this is key, it is waterproof.

Remember, it rains 70 inches a year in Hong Kong. Do you want the noodle stand down on the street to give you your dumplings in a paper bag? One that could be soaked by the time you cross the street — and perhaps disintegrating into pulp, and spilling your noodles onto the street?

You certainly do not, and merchants here know what their customers want. Waterproof plastic!

So, you see plastic everywhere. All the time.  And you wonder where it all goes. (Now I feel like the Andie McDowell character in “Sex, Lies and Videotape” … “What do they do with all the garbage?”)

I imagine there is some giant landfill out in the New Territories, filled with plastic bags stuffed with trash and garbage … bags that won’t disintegrate for decades. Or centuries.

I could get into other areas, as well. How hard it is to recycle plastic bottles or aluminum cans, or newspapers. How few recycling sites there are. How there appears to be zero sorting of trash here.  How some aluminum cans still have those old peel-off pop tops — with the little tear-shape-with-a-ring thingies that end up strewn wherever.

But it’s the plastic that seems to me the largest problem, and perhaps the hardest to solve. This town needs some reusable (or biodegradable) sort of carrying container that is NOT plastic.  I don’t know what it is, but in the meantime there is some landfill somewhere that has to be adding about a million plastic bags — per day — to its load. We are all Bag Ladies here, in the most basic way.