"It's disturbing, and it's only getting worse," said the 29-year-old Belgian-born housewife of the pollution in the suburban town she made her home two years ago.

"If we could, we'd move from here. But we have to stay for my husband's work."

Cheng's assessment is a sad indictment of a gleaming new town that is being groomed as a model of future living, a suburban alternative to Hong Kong's increasingly crowded urban districts.

Nestled among some of Hong Kong's most beautiful hills, just a stone's throw from the sprawling airport, Tung Chung is on Hong Kong's frontline of a raging pollution crisis that is engulfing much of southern China.

In a huge arc that takes in Guangzhou in the centre of China's economic heartland and the Chinese territories of Macau and Hong Kong on the coast, cities are choking beneath a filthy cloud of smog produced by tens of thousands of factories and power stations and millions of vehicles plying southern China's heavily industrialised Pearl River Delta Region.

While Hong Kong produces huge amounts of its own pollution, particularly from road vehicles, environmental group Hong Kong Friends of the Earth and the local government estimate 80-90 percent of the city's air contaminants blow in from the Pearl River Delta.

Perched on the northern shore of Lantau Island in China's Pearl River estuary, Tung Chung takes the brunt of that smoggy cloud as it is carried by prevailing easterly winds.

Compounding the problem is a fringe of leafy hills that trap air over the town.

"Most of the pollution that drifts into Tung Chung is from heavy-vehicle emissions -- on the mainland vehicles use poorer quality fuel than locally," Steven Cheng, environmental affairs officer at Friends of the Earth, told AFP.

"It is, simply, the worst place for pollution in Hong Kong."

Air quality data collected hourly from government monitors around the territory attest to that. Readings routinely place the new town in the "high" pollution bracket, with measurements often as much as 10 percent above those from other areas.

On September 14 last year Tung Chung's monitor registered, for the first time anywhere in Hong Kong, a count of more than 200 -- classifying air pollution as "very high" and carrying with it a health warning.

News like this has not been received well in Tung Chung, a 40-minute subway ride from downtown.

A survey by Friends of the Earth recently found a quarter of all respondents had, like Valerie Cheng, thought about leaving because of the poor air quality.

Half the respondents also claimed to have developed some sort of respiratory ailment since moving to the town and two-thirds thought pollution in the area was getting worse.

The pollution is almost tangible in Tung Chung. On a good day the hills, no more than a kilometre (about half a mile) away, are barely visible and on poor days, even the town's skyscrapers are hidden behind a brown-grey haze.

The air also smells bad: mingling with the cloying aroma of the general haze is the reek of spent jet fuel from the airport nearby and the fetid stench that blows off the muddy waters of Tung Chung Bay.

It's a state of affairs that is beginning to raise concerns among the city's business leaders.

"The pollution problem is one that we are very, very concerned about," said Christopher Hammerbeck, executive director of the British Chamber of Commerce, an organisation that represents more than 2,000 companies in the territory.

"We see it as among the most pressing issues facing business in this whole region.

"If it isn't addressed, in the long run it will be counterproductive," Hammerbeck said. "Young people will not want to move to an area where their children's health will be put at risk."

The negative publicity the pollution problem is generating in Tung Chung is also a worry for government officials who have big plans for the town.

Mostly built since the airport opened in 1998, it is blazing a trail for a string of high-rise housing estates, office blocks and tourist attractions planned for largely undeveloped Lantau island that are designed to boost the local population to 220,000 by 2020.

The opening of a Hong Kong Disneyland on the other side of Lantau in September is also expected to spur growth in Tung Chung, especially in support industries.

Environmentalists object to the plans saying they will gobble some of the territory's last vestiges of pristine forest and that one of the planned facilities, a logistics park, would also worsen pollution.

"It's a dangerous plan," said Friends of the Earth's Cheng. "The logistics park alone will multiply the volume of heavy vehicles in the area and that will have a serious effect on an already bad air quality problem."

With real estate agents reporting a sag in the number of relocation inquiries to the area, there are now concerns among environmentalists that the residential plans may be scrapped in favour of more industry and more pollution.

"A bad problem is likely only to get much worse," lamented Cheng.

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