Embarking on my international placement in Hong Kong, I never imagined that the biggest lesson I’d learn would come from a plastic bottle.
For most of my placement I’ve lived in Mong Kok, the most densely populated district in the world, full of old buildings, crowded pavements and neon signs. Chaos. Yet a twenty-minute MTR ride takes you to a green peak or quiet coastal path, and that contrast changed how I see sustainability. Hong Kong is a working answer to SDG 11: a city of seven million that runs on public transport, leaves its hills standing, and proves density done well is sustainability. I rode that system daily without noticing I was riding it.
At the start of my exchange, I told myself I cared about the environment. I walked, took the MTR, and avoided taxis. But Hong Kong’s tap water isn’t always safe in older buildings, and my residence has a single refill station, so I began buying plastic bottles almost daily. It felt practical. Temporary. Harmless.
A month later I flew to Thailand, to the Phi Phi Islands. At the dock I was charged a 20-baht conservation fee. Twenty baht. About fifty cents, an awkward amount no one carries in change. I thought it was nonsense.
Then I got to the beach.
Plastic bottles drifted near the shore. Wrappers moved with the waves. Rubbish sat in corners of sand that should’ve looked untouched. The 20 baht stopped feeling like nonsense. It felt embarrassingly small. I felt furious at mass tourism, at careless visitors, at the way people damage even the most beautiful places they’re lucky enough to enter.
And then, swimming in this damaged paradise, a plastic bottle drifted up beside me.
Who exactly are you criticising? it asked. Them, or yourself?
In that moment, the bottle became a mirror. I knew exactly where I’d seen it before: in my room, in my backpack, in the bin after another “practical” purchase. I’d been criticising the visible damage of tourism while ignoring the smaller, daily habits that made me part of the same problem. Every bottle I’d bought in Hong Kong could end up exactly where this one had. I felt embarrassed.
Since then, I’ve changed how I travel. I bought a reusable metal bottle and committed to refilling it, linking my choices to SDG 12: responsible consumption. I’ve also built a sustainable-travel toolkit: Google Maps in Hong Kong, Amap in mainland China and Naver Maps in Korea, so I read each city through its public network instead of adding another taxi to the road. I use myclimate to weigh longer journeys’ emissions, connecting to SDG 13, and Yindii, Hong Kong’s surplus-food app, to rescue meals that would otherwise be wasted.
My clearest lesson didn’t come from a policy document. It came from a plastic bottle in paradise, quietly reminding me that sustainable travel begins when we stop only seeing other people’s waste, and start recognising our own.
References:
https://sdgs.un.org/goals
https://co2.myclimate.org
https://www.yindii.co
https://maps.google.com
https://mobile.amap.com
https://map.naver.com
