Cities feed their refuse to bugs, and get biogas back

SCMP
December 3, 2010

SCMP.com - Lawmakers, greens find five ways to curb waste

SCMP.com - Lawmakers, greens find five ways to curb waste: "SCMP.com - Lawmakers, greens find five ways to curb waste"

Adrian Wan
Nov 10, 2010

Green groups and several lawmakers have come up with an action plan to reduce by two-thirds the amount of solid waste produced in the city by 2022.

The action plan aims to cut the 9,000 tonnes of solid waste generated each day to 3,000 tonnes by then.

It was devised by 19 groups and individuals - including Green Sense, Green Power, Greeners Action, WWF and lawmakers Tanya Chan and Andrew Cheng Kar-foo.

They suggest five ways to meet the target: fee-based waste disposal; increased recycling of leftover food; raising awareness of and responsibility for waste; boosting research; and building recycling and treatment facilities.

Generating less waste and promoting reuse should be the top priorities, followed by recycling and, as a last resort, methods such as incineration and landfills, Michelle Au Wing-tsz of Friends of the Earth said.

The government thinks otherwise. Environment secretary Edward Yau Tang-wah says two incinerators will be built, at Shek Kwu Chau, off Lantau, and in Tuen Mun.

Those behind the action plan said they would try to stop the incinerators being built. "Not only do we reject this plan of introducing incinerators, we will mobilise the public in a campaign against it," Au said.

Green groups involved in the action plan said the issue of waste management had been ignored for years.

Albert Lai Kwong-tak, chairman of middle-class lobby group the Professional Commons, said the city should learn from London's experience. "The former mayor of London told me they had made a mistake in building two incinerators hastily, and the city had lost the impetus to reduce waste," Lai said.

Lawmaker Cyd Ho Sau-lan, who was involved in the action plan, said getting people to buy only what they needed was critical to changing the habits of those in the world's most wasteful city. She said business would likely be in favour of the incinerators. "Asking everybody to reduce waste is tantamount to asking them to buy less," she said.

A Baptist University survey released last week concluded the city should build five more incinerators, not two. The report said while many Hongkongers still considered incineration unclean, technological improvements had made it a clean and effective way to dispose of waste.

And incinerators can also generate electricity. The report cited Macau, where an incinerator generates enough power for 33,000 families.

In Germany, 75 incinerators handle 18 million tonnes of rubbish a year and provide 60,000 jobs. In Japan, three-quarters of solid waste is burned and only 1.7 per cent goes to landfills, the report said.

Last year, the city generated 6.45 million tonnes of municipal solid waste - more than double the amount two decades ago and equal to 921 kilograms for each of its seven million people. The figure excludes construction and hazardous waste.

SCMP.com - Dioxin goal threatened by loose monitoring

SCMP.com - Dioxin goal threatened by loose monitoring: "SCMP.com - Dioxin goal threatened by loose monitoring"

Stephen Chen Nov 09, 2010 Beijing set a target to reduce dioxin emissions by 10 per cent by 2015, according to a guideline released last week. The problem is: how can they tell if the goal is reached? All new waste incinerators will be required to use the best proven technology. This is good news for European and Japanese incineration companies with undisguised interest in the Chinese market, the surface of which has only been scratched, but it also frees the incinerators from continuous monitoring. A waste-burning plant needs to be checked only once a year, and as part of the drill plants are usually informed beforehand. Jointly set by nine central government agencies including the National Development and Reform Commission, the target dictates China's international responsibility as a member of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (Pops). Dioxin is one of the deadliest Pops, according to the World Health Organisation. Long-term exposure leads to the fatal breakdown of the immune, nervous, reproductive and endocrine systems, and it causes several types of cancer, depending on the level of dioxin present in the environment, which is usually very small. Material that contains chlorine, such as ore, plastic and even paper, will release dioxin when burnt. But the dioxin breaks down when waste gas is heated to more than 850 degrees Celsius, a theory highlighted by incineration promotion brochures. However, few acknowledge that when the waste gas cools the dioxin will reappear and, if some highly expensive and energy consuming absorbing methods are not applied, will go straight into the food chain. Any dioxin of more than one billionth of a gram within one cubic metre of the waste gas discharged is considered dangerous. And that's the standard of China, the most tolerant in the world. In Europe and many other developed countries, the benchmark is one-tenth of that. China discharged more than 10 kilograms of dioxin in 2004, according to official statistics. It is estimated this increased exponentially in recent years due to the construction of many small, low-tech, poorly run incinerators. As the guideline pledges to scrap and replace those incinerators with larger ones with proven technology, "that's good news for companies from countries such as Japan and Germany", said Jiang Jianguo, professor of Tsinghua University's department of environmental science and engineering. Some domestic companies claim they can absorb as much dioxin as their overseas competitors at only a tenth of the cost. "They lie," Jiang said. The government could not verify the result by checking once a year. Continuous monitoring would not only prevent major environmental hazards, but also ease public concern about waste incineration. It is expensive and technically challenging, but possible, according to a researcher at the Laboratory of Dioxin Detection under the National Research Centre for Environmental Analysis and Measurement. To collect enough samples an inspector must clamber on top of a chimney more than 60 metres high and spend hours capturing waste gas with a netting device, a task that could not be completed without the plant's assistance, said the researcher, who refused to be named because of her employer's media policy. The analysis of the sample would take 1-1/2 months and cost tens of thousands of yuan. Repeating the task each month would require a substantial input of labour and money, she said. "But it's not impossible if it is a concern of 1.3 billion people."

SCMP.com - Climate experts hold out little hope

SCMP.com - Climate experts hold out little hope: "SCMP.com - Climate experts hold out little hope"

Cheung Chi-fai
Nov 04, 2010

Speaker after speaker at a major climate change conference yesterday warned of a looming catastrophe. But they did not think much was going to be done about it at global warming negotiations later this month in Cancun, Mexico.

In one of the largest gatherings of climate experts in Hong Kong, many taking part said urgent and co-ordinated steps needed to be taken by world governments to halt the accelerating effects of climate change.

But most were critical of the lack of progress made since the UN's climate summit in Copenhagen in December.

The international experts were speaking at the start of the four-day Climate Dialogue run by the independent think tank Civic Exchange at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.

"It is good to talk but I am sceptical that we will see significant progress in Cancun," said Professor David Drewry, a British

environmental scientist with special interest in the polar region. "I hope they can have the agenda shaped in order to get a better road map to our destination," said Drewry who sat on the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Painting a gloomy picture of the future for the Arctic, he warned of a melting ice sheet, at a rate of 40,100 square kilometres a year, and the potential catastrophe resulting from the loss of methane-rich permafrost - soil or rocks at below zero degrees Celsius all year round - in Siberia. James Hansen, a Nasa scientist who has been dubbed the "godfather of global warming", said of the Cancun summit: "There is no cause of high expectation." Hansen said nothing much was achieved in the Copenhagen summit because it was heading in the wrong direction of cap and trade which he suspected would only serve the fossil fuel industry. "It is much better to have a year or two of delay to get started on a more effective approach," he said. Hansen advocates drastically raising the price of fossil fuels to encourage a switch to alternative energy and to phase out the use of coal. Sharing his anxiety was Will Steffen, executive director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University, who drew the conference audience's attention to the threat to biodiversity from global warming. "We are running out of time," he said. Species were disappearing at a much faster rate than before but its impact on the planet was not known, he said. The loss meant humans would lose significant sources of food and medicine as well as the ability to stabilise climate through the storage of carbon in organic species. Martin Lees, former secretary general of global think tank Club of Rome in Switzerland, said people needed to be realistic. "It has taken 200 years to create this massive problem and we can't expect to salvage [it] in a few months," he said, adding Cancun should be seen as one step on the road to global consensus. Dr Hu Tao, co-ordinator of the UN-China Climate Change Partnership Programme, warned that a Republican-controlled Congress after the midterm elections in the US could stall climate talks. "If the Republicans take control, it will be even harder to push legislation for climate change," he said. "Without the US, the negotiations will be rocky."

SCMP.com - Heated pools and Deep Bay views, but it's still just a sludge incinerator

SCMP.com - Heated pools and Deep Bay views, but it's still just a sludge incinerator: "SCMP.com - Heated pools and Deep Bay views, but it's still just a sludge incinerator"

Cheung Chi-fai Oct 28, 2010 Its wave-like design aims to blend in with the coast in front and the hills behind, incorporates three heated swimming pools, a viewing platform with a vista of Deep Bay, and an environmental education centre, and will produce enough energy to meet its needs and also power 3,000 homes. Yet all these attractive features cannot disguise the fact a HK$4.9 billion facility in Tuen Mun is merely an incinerator for processing sludge from sewage treatment plants.Needless to say, it has not won over local politicians, who staunchly oppose any idea of building a solid-waste incinerator beside it. Tuen Mun district councillors consulted about the sludge plant's design said it would be the last unpopular facility they would accept. Councillor Lothar Lee Hung-sham said the leisure and education facilities were a gimmick to woo Tuen Mun residents into accepting further waste incineration facilities."Why do we need such heated pools or an education centre? We don't need to be educated about incineration if such a facility does not exist here in the first place," he said.The government has not ruled out seeking approval for a proposed solid waste incinerator next to the sludge incinerator in Tuen Mun, or on outlying island Shek Kwu Chau. Yet Lee said the council strongly opposed any more polluting facilities in Tuen Mun as the district already had two power stations, a cement-making plant, steel-mill, landfill and an aviation fuel storage. Chan Shue-ying, another councillor, said the sludge plant was not opposed as they hoped it would be the final facility. Such opposition will be a blow to officials who had hoped the extra facilities would win public acceptance of thermal waste treatment. The government unveiled details yesterday as it announced it had awarded a contract to design, build and operate the plant to VW-VES Hong Kong, a subsidiary of French environmental giant Veolia. The burning chamber will be hidden behind glass exterior walls with the 50-metre stacks barely visible from outside. To allay fears over emissions, the Environmental Protection Department has also agreed to set up a new air-quality monitoring station in Tuen Mun to closely track air pollution in the area, but its exact location has not been decided. The incinerator, at the northern end of the Tsang Tsui ash lagoon, is environment officials' long-awaited solution for treating the foul-smelling sludge now dumped in landfill sites. Able to handle 2,000 tonnes of sludge a day, the facility will take all of the 800 tonnes now produced each day, which is expected to grow to 1,500 tonnes in 2014. Officials have blamed the undesirable practice of burying the sludge in landfills for creating a bad smell affecting Tseung Kwan O residents. With incineration, the landfills will take only the burnt residue. Edward Yau Tang-wah, the environment secretary, hailed the plan, saying it would incorporate the latest incineration technology and meet the most stringent emission standards in the world. "The project shows modern technology can offer a much better solution and also provide facilities that will be popular with the local community," he said after a ceremony to sign the contracts.