Government gets buried under its own mess

Environment Secretary Edward Yau Tang-wah is one of the nicer members of Donald Tsang Yam-kuen's cabinet, but he is now learning a painful truth the hard way. You can get away with avoiding tough choices for a time, but eventually reality catches up with you. And then you've got trouble as all the past neglect comes back to haunt you.

For many years - some would say decades - we have known two things about our waste disposal policy: we throw away far too much because we don't recycle nearly enough; and the method we have chosen for getting rid of what can't be recycled is simply unsustainable. We know as a community what we need to do about both of these things, but we haven't done any of them because they require us to choose between several unpopular options.

For a government obsessed with short-term thinking, whose main policy aim seems to be to avoid negative headlines in tomorrow's newspapers, making such choices is something to be deferred at all costs, preferably indefinitely.

Let's start with recycling. Our efforts in this area have been pretty pathetic. Only after many years have we devised a system for recycling most paper. And finally, after repeated deferrals and much anguish, we introduced a plastic bag levy. But where are we on electronic waste? What about bottles and cans?

The downstream arrangements would also require some creative policymaking - maybe provision of free land so that social enterprises could break even with the recycling operations. And isn't policymaking why we have ministers and a cabinet in the first place?

Of all the possible methods of disposing of the residual waste, surely the daftest is to fill up pristine valleys in the New Territories and then wonder what happened to all our beautiful countryside.

There are alternatives. Modern high-temperature incinerators are now available that can safely reduce waste to an absolute minimum (even the resulting ash can be put to good use) and generate electricity in the process. Some models would even be able to cope with the current volume being generated, and the already dumped rubbish.