Call to recognise plight of Hong Kong’s ‘cardboard grannies’, who have no homes, savings or family

Sister Wong, a cardboard seller in Hong Kong, is 65 years old, with no home, savings, or support from her two adult children. Besides a pension of about HK$3,000, the former civil servant earns less than HK$1,000 every month from reselling cardboard, hovering around the city’s poverty line of HK$3,800 a month.

Wong is among an estimated group of 5,000 “cardboard grannies”, who collect and sell waste boxes in the city, a large proportion of them based in Sham Shui Po, one of the poorest districts in Hong Kong.