Rubber Crumb Washes Up On Lantau Beach

Hundreds of kilogrammes of small bits of rubber has washed up on the shoreline of Discovery Bay on Lantau Island over the past day, with a green group warning that the spill poses a threat to marine life.

Plastic Free Seas says they’re not completely certain what the material is, but it seems very much like the rubber crumb used for astroturf.

“It’s definitely not something we want [marine life] to eat,” said Dana Winograd, operations director of Plastic Free Seas. “If a sea animal were to eat a lot of it, it would get too full... it can get lodged in their systems, so it’s not a good thing for the sea life, that’s for sure.”

Winograd noticed the large quantity of small rubber pellets on Tuesday, and managed to scoop out more than 50 kilogrammes of the material that evening.

The group alerted the Marine Department, and by 1pm on Wednesday volunteers and government contractors had managed to collect 425 kilogrammes.

Volunteers have been using sieves, fine mesh bags, and brushes to get the pellets out of the water and out of the sand. The rubber crumb is also sinking to the sea bed, making things even more difficult for volunteers.

There’s also no clue yet as to where the rubber crumb came from.

“An inter-departmental taskforce called Clean Shorelines was set up after the pellet spill [in 2012], and it was supposed to handle these kinds of situations, and it doesn’t seem like it does help,” Winograd told RTHK’s Richard Pyne.

She said the government has sent people to help, but the concern is the lack of an emergency response system.

“If it had been something say on the scope of the plastic pellet spill of 2012, again we have no system in place – so this is the problem,” she said. “I would’ve hoped that they would’ve learnt something from then and had more of an emergency response system in place for this sort of situation.”