During the holidays, when I was rearranging furniture for a refurbishment at

home, I stumbled upon the Hang Zhou Study Tour Album. Surprisingly, the
first memory that came to mind was this when we were cruising around the
Saiwoo west river, I saw a sleek white figure galloping towards me. At first I
thought I had a burst of excitement; perhaps it was a caroling swan, or an
exotic bird, but it turned out that it was merely a discarded plastic bag
reflecting upon the sun. A sudden spark of thought came about: if such
prominent tourist attraction already has an uncontrollable amount of waste,
what should we do with Hong Kongs Waste?
Waste is a common difficulty faced by affluent societies, where affordable
products, bringing greater convenience, flood households. Hong Kong is no
exception to this problem. Its waste has rapidly risen since 1986 because of
an outburst in economic growth. This causes a lot of waste going into landfills
everyday, but the three concentrated centres, Tseung Kwan O (South), Ta
Kwu Ling (North) and Nim Wan (West), will all reach capacity by 2015, 2017
and 2019 respectively. This is a silent crisis that will doom Hong Kong if we do
not act promplty.
Therefore, we need to massively decrease the amount of Municipal
Solid Waste (MSW), the most common waste, which includes domestic,
commercial and industrial solid waste, making up 45 per cent of the total
waste. Thus, exploring a short term solution, I suggest building an integrated
waste management facility (IWMF) expanding landfills and implementing a
charging system.
However, many people suggest that selfish, narrow-minded Hong Kong
citizens believe in the motto Not in my backyard, meaning that they desire
for the facility to be built, but never near to them. This caused the integrated
waste treatment facility proposals to fail when presented upon the legislative
council. The reason why so many people refuse to cooperate in passing of the
proposal is due to one vital reason their fear of dioxin, which is a highly toxic
chemical that causes cancer. Nonetheless, I still insist on using the IWMF
because almost no dioxin would be found in the flue gas. Research show

there is gas treatment and filtering systems in the incinerator emission

complex and it is only a perception from local residents to believing that it
emits dioxin. In addition, people also disagree with expanding the three
landfills in Hong Kong, as it would impact on more pollution, and expressing
small part of the national park. Yet, the reality is, no waste management
facility can fully breakdown waste, and there is still need for a place to store
these residues. Thus, by denying the landfill expansions, we are generating
more pollution, as over crowding waste would find its way onto the streets,
rivers, and even in national parks! Let me ask you a question: Would you
rather protect national parks, but live in a pungent, unsanitary place, or
would you rather use small plots to store waste, ensuring a comfortable
environment to live in? I think most people would choose the second option.
Even though expanding the three landfills and building the IWMF would
significantly reduce stored waste, we need to find a concrete solution to
diminish its source, thus producing less waste.
That is why a charging system, promoting the 3Rs (Reduce, Reuse,
Recycle), and the subsidy in the recycling industry is important in order to
accomplish

source

reduction. The

charging

scheme

is

now

under

consideration and consultation with the government. The principle of this

system is wasteful residents will bear harsher fees, and there are 3 factors to
determine ones use: by the measurement of water consumption; the use of
specialized garbage bags; and charge via management fee.
For the first method, the water authorities would collect trash fee,
charging proportionally to the water consumption. For the second method, the
government would issue a specially labeled garbage bag, whereby the
garbage truck would only collect trash. At the same time, the government
would have to minimize the number of trashcans on the streets and install
monitoring systems to prevent residents from abusing public trashcans. For
the last method, the charge is in proportion to the total floor area and evenly
distributed amongst each flat, and the building management company would
be responsible for user fee collection.

Another method to source reduction is through promotions. Due to

landfill saturation, the government ought to promote the message of source
reduction, through commercials, the news, leaflets, or mascots like the
litterbug and most importantly, lectures at schools or additional topics in the
liberal art studies to make all citizens aware of environmental protection and
reduction.
Furthermore, Reuse, Reduce and Recycle (3R) plays a critical role.
The 3Rs are derived from the EU Waste Hierarchy. There are 5 options in the
waste hierarchy, reduce, meaning to use less material in manufacturing;
reuse, signifying to clean, repair, refurbish items for useful daily tools; recycle,
turning waste into new products; recovery, including anaerobic digestion,
incineration with energy recovery, gasification etcetera; disposing waste in
landfills or incinerators without energy recovery. In Hong Kong, residents have
mostly been recycling and waste disposal, as seen from more recycling bins ,
and from continued dumping into the landfill. However, as the crisis
approaches, there have been changes to the problem. Now, the government
has proposed a campaign called Food Wise, to encourage Hong Kong
businesses/organizations in adopting measures to reduce food waste within
their establishment. This means that the government encourages people to
reduce more waste, which is one step further into saving the environment.
Last but not least, subsidies for the recycling industry also help source
reduction. Even though there are numerous recycling bins distributed
throughout Hong Kong, 99% of our locally recycled are exported for further
overseas processing (mainly China), so that our local waste recycling industry
is limited to the primary process phase: recovery, bale and exports. However,
this has little economic value, and is only able to create few job opportunities.
Also, being too dependent on exports makes the industry vulnerable to
external economic factors, such as the global financial tsunami in 2008, which
caused the waste paper price plummeting from HK$2,000 to HK$700 per
tonne and making the process of recycling profitless and unavoidable.
(greenpower.org) Therefore, with this huge problem in the recycling industry,

the only way to save the industry is for the government to produce subsidies
so that people could open more Eco Parks and would solve the waste
exporting problems.
Time is ticking by the second we have to make our choice now, to save
Hong Kong, to save the environment, and to save the our planet!