It's a simple contraption -- an iron frame, foldout handle and four
rubber wheels -- but in Hong Kong the old-fashioned handcart is
what keeps the city rolling.
In the shadow of skyscrapers, Hong Kong's working class trolley
pushers transport everything from crates of live seafood to
appliances, financial documents, furniture and mail.
But among the street cleaners, market traders and removal men, it
is probably the city's elderly scavengers who best highlight how
vital handcarts are to the city.
Lee Cheung-Ho, 78, spends all day pushing her cart, and says she
even goes out when there is a typhoon.
"I have to go out and make a living," she told AFP without
stopping. "It helps even if I can only earn a few dollars."
The estimated 10,000 scavengers in Hong Kong collect cardboard, tin
cans and scrap metal, selling it on for a few dollars to recycling
centres to ship to mainland China.
With Hong Kong's landfill sites set to reach capacity by 2020, this
is seen as one way of addressing a looming environmental
crisis.
But scavenging is also a means for many of the city's poor to
scrape by.
The financial hub, known as one of the world's wealthiest cities,
last month said that 1.31 million of its citizens were living in
poverty.
Almost one in five is classified as poor and for the elderly the
proportion rises to one in three, according to government data.
The scavengers AFP talked to fell well within that bracket, earning
as little as HK$20 (US$3) a day.
Handcarts can be seen everywhere in the city. On a 10 minute walk
around one neighbourhood, an AFP reporter counted 103, many stacked
head-high with cardboard, others rattling with empty office water
cooler cannisters, one carrying an air conditioning unit, another a
fridge-freezer.
Adam Bobbette, an expert on the urban environment at Hong Kong
University, said handcarts were at the smallest end of a transport
scale that includes the city's vast cargo ships, trade lorries and
red taxis.
And they are a necessity in a city with narrow streets and
alleyways, and restricted parking.
"One of the best ways to think about trolleys in Hong Kong is as a
kind of elementary unit within the broader urban metabolism of the
city," he said.
"That older way of life has found a way to persist within the city
because of its functional value.
"Should the trolley be celebrated within Hong Kong?
Absolutely."
But rather than being celebrated, some people complain that the
trolleys, often locked to railings like bicycles, take up space on
the pavement and could cause accidents. They are often pushed along
on the side of roads, forcing traffic to carefully overtake.
There were 11 accidents involving pushcarts recorded in the first
half of this year, according to a transport department
spokeswoman.
And of two trolley-related fatalities last year, one cart pusher
was hit by a bus and the other by a taxi. Both were in their
70s.
The spokeswoman did not offer any praise for the handcart when
asked about its value to the city.
"Pedestrians using a handcart... should take extra care to protect
their own safety and the safety of others," she said in a
statement.
The future of the handcart may not be under threat but like much
else in Hong Kong it is still subject to the influence of mainland
China.
Sparks flew as Mackey Li, 46, welded the axle of a broken trolley
in his workshop.
Li says his business -- inherited from his father and running for
60 years -- is the last on the island where handcarts are built
from scratch.
But his son and daughter are both at university and will not be
following in their father’s footsteps -- meaning that when he
retires in a few years most handcarts will come from the
mainland.
"Most of the trolleys are made in mainland China nowadays -- but
they don’t last very long, he told AFP.
"They can beat you by selling the handcarts at a very cheap
price."
He added that without trolleys the city would be clogged with even
more traffic.
Hong Kong is already choked with pollution -- much of it from
roadside emissions -- that kills more than 3,000 residents a year,
according to a study by Hong Kong University.
But Li shrugged off suggestions the handcart could symbolise the
city's wealth gap, one of the world's greatest.
"It's just a tool," he said. "And even rich people need to
carry things."
Nearby, a 90-year-old woman scavenger with a bent spine collected
two bin liners of cardboard from a coffee shop, where a cappuccino
cost more than her daily earnings.
But she told AFP that pushing the cart was also a chance to do some
exercise and fill her time.
"What would I do if I didn't go out?" she asked, looking up through
eyes clouded grey with cataracts.
"Do you just want me to stay at home and wait to die?"
