SCMP.com - Landfill vote puts incinerator on front burner

SCMP.com - Landfill vote puts incinerator on front burner: "SCMP.com - Landfill vote puts incinerator on front burner"

Cheung Chi-fai
Oct 15, 2010

Incinerators or landfills? In the wake of the opposition to the landfill extension plan at Tseung Kwan O, the government is being backed into a corner to put incineration back on the agenda as a solution to the city's mounting waste problem despite its notorious unpopularity.

Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen called yesterday for "proactively" building a community consensus on how to deal with the city's waste, after lawmakers blocked the landfill plan.

Stressing that no single district should bear the responsibility of handling the city's 18,000 tonnes of daily waste, Tsang vowed to learn from the experience of Japan, where the community accepts incineration facilities close to their homes.

His comments were well received by Tuen Mun district councillor Yim Tin-sang, from the Association for Democracy and People's Livelihood.

Yim said that although he was determined to oppose a plan to build an incinerator on his constituents' doorstep to serve the whole of the city's waste disposal needs, he could see a way out for the government.

With reference to the recent controversy over columbariums, during which Tsang called for each district to shoulder some of the responsibility, Yim called on the districts to share the waste burden by either having an incinerator or helping to reduce waste. "They should have their own incinerators and if they don't want one, please show us they have done enough to reduce waste to a satisfactory level," he said. "The people just can't generate as much waste as they want, knowing that the waste will be transferred somewhere else." Yim proposes dividing the city into five areas and building an incinerator in each area. If a district does not want an incinerator, it should show it has done its best to minimise waste. The Environmental Protection Department has long been aware of the obstacles in siting an incinerator in Tuen Mun, home to the city's largest landfill and proposed as the site for a sludge incinerator. It is studying an alternative site for the incinerator on Shek Kwu Chau, off south Lantau. The department had initially considered decentralising waste incineration but later concluded it was more cost-effective to build one big plant capable of handling at least 3,000 tonnes a day. It has tried to convince the public that incineration using the latest technology is much less polluting than the type of incinerators used in the 1970s. Hong Kong's last incinerator closed in 1997 and since then the city has relied solely on landfills. Yim's idea was cautiously received by Kowloon City district councillor Bruce Liu Sing-lee, who belongs to Yim's party. Liu said the matter should be studied from a wider perspective. "Every district might have some unwanted facilities which the other district doesn't have," he said, citing funeral halls in Kowloon City as an unwanted element in his district. An environmental activist warned that the discussion about the city's waste management should not be limited to a choice between landfills and incineration, otherwise the real issues would be ignored, and that the attitude of "not in my backyard" should be dropped for a more co-operative approach. "We don't oppose incineration but we should be cautious about it before we have properly done everything we can to reduce waste," Friends of the Earth environmental affairs manager Hahn Chu Hon-keung said. Chu cited the experience of Taipei, which has three incinerators but only one is being used because a change in government policy to promote waste reduction and recycling dramatically cut the amount of burnable waste being produced. "The local community's long-standing opposition to incinerators built up sufficient pressure on the authorities to introduce more aggressive waste-reduction policies like waste charging. As a result the waste volume dropped sharply," he said. Chu criticised Tsang's professed satisfaction with the rate of recycling in Hong Kong, which stands at about 50 to 60 per cent. He said South Korea had achieved a recycling rate of more than 90 per cent, with less than 10 per cent of the country's waste going to incinerators or landfills. "The government still owes us what it promised to do on waste reduction. It should be committed to finishing that first," he said.