There is no mention of reducing the amount of electricity used, just switching to cleaner fuels. I have to dress like an Eskimo at home during cold snaps because like almost all Hong Kong residents, my apartment has no insulation in the walls or roof, and my windows are single glazed.

I think about how difficult it is to keep heat in my apartment in winter and it always leads me to despair of the amount of electricity I waste during most of the rest of the year when I'm pumping out cool air from my air-conditioning units.

It should be the easiest policy decision to ever make to change our woeful building regulations and insist that all new housing is insulated and double glazed, and then to start thinking about subsidising some retrofitting.

I am sure this has been thought of many times in government, but I imagine that the powerful lobbying groups headed by property developers, landlords and electricity companies would be totally against such moves as it would eat into their profits.

I would be very interested to hear the Environment Bureau's views on how it expects consumers to cut down on their electricity use further when the bureau does nothing about building regulations that are part of the root cause of over-consumption and that are surely the most environment unfriendly in the developed world.

Sam Horner, Lantau

Why hill must be redeveloped

I refer to the article by Bernard Chan ('Unease about rich-poor gap fuels proxy war over heritage', December 30).

One real issue that we must face is that Central is desperately short of grade-A office buildings. This is raising rents to historic highs. It will erode our competitiveness vis-?-vis other major cities in this part of the world.

Having taken up the huge Tamar site, the government must release a comparable site to meet the continuous need for our economic development.

Like the airport runways, we must not plan our urban commercial land use on the assumption of zero growth.

The Tamar site should have been left as a land bank during the last economic slump.

Now that the administration has taken it up, it must release as much land as possible at the Central Government Offices site at Government Hill for redevelopment. This is not for developers; it is for the pent-up need of our economy.

Sam Chow, Admiralty

Indecent haste over third runway

That Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen's administration is fixated with mammoth infrastructure projects is startling. It is illustrated (yet again) by the quite indecent haste to approve proposals to build a third runway at Chek Lap Kok ('Decision time as public backs third runway', December 30).

This government will not have any due diligence studies unlike Britain's Department for Transport in respect of third runway proposals at Heathrow airport.

Nor will there be a social return on investment study, which examines in detail the benefits and costs both environmental and social. Such a study was commissioned for Heathrow.

Nor will the quite dodgy growth projections be subjected to proper scrutiny, for example the air cargo figures, which are already in terminal decline (no pun intended) as manufacturing operations move out of the Pearl River Delta.

Nothing indeed of the sort. Instead Secretary for Transport and Housing Eva Cheng will seemingly rely on a study carried out by the project proponent (the Hong Kong Airport Authority), and by counting the votes in a trite questionnaire distributed to the public at large. This is surely the biggest outsourcing of decision-making ever undertaken by any administration.

All this just to get one's name on the decision before Donald Tsang leaves office. It is irresponsible in the extreme not to have due diligence on a decision which is so far-reaching, on our pockets, on our environment, and on our air quality.

We might start dispensing with our bureaucrats if they cannot do what they are paid to do.

Clive Noffke, Lantau

Feasibility study is important

Reading the report 'Decision time as public backs third runway' (December 30), I find it odd that the public consultation was launched and a go-ahead is recommended without the feasibility study having been done. Unlike the funding study, this is a matter of what can or cannot be done.

What good is 73 per cent of the public giving support for that option and the government giving the go-ahead if they then find that it cannot be done?

Part of the feasibility hinges on airspace being made available to Hong Kong to accommodate a holding area to the north of the airport and on the westward extension of the SAR's airspace to accommodate the final approach from the west to the new runway. Have the public and the government been told that these can and will be done?

It must also be pointed out that the public has only been given the choice between staying put with two runways and adding a third one at Chek Lap Kok.

Its preference for the latter must not be taken to mean it has rejected having a remote third runway elsewhere or a new three-runway airport (with potential for a fourth runway, which Chek Lap Kok does not have) elsewhere, which would ease the air traffic congestion in the Pearl River Delta area and the air traffic complexity in Hong Kong's terminal airspace.

Peter Lok, Chai Wan

Legionella threat nothing new

The presence of [potentially] deadly Legionella pneumophila within the water pipes of the city's buildings, new and old, is a massively underreported public health issue.

In the past it has in most instances been swept under the carpet. However, now the government must proactively address this widespread issue like any other developed society.

Apparently, it takes a public figure such as Education Secretary Michael Suen Ming-yeung to fall ill from this bacteria for the government to launch an investigation.

The luxury residential building in Mid-Levels where I lived was confirmed with the presence of unacceptably high levels of Legionella pneumophila several years ago and there was a reported case of illness. The Water Services Department and Department of Health refused to investigate the offending pipes despite multiple requests from residents. Also, they would not alert residents of any danger, take any action against the property management company over shoddy maintenance practices, or pass any kind of new legislation for mandatory cleaning and maintenance practices to better protect public health.

It is time for these departments to come clean about the risks we all face from legionella, its widespread prevalence throughout our building stock, and the urgent need for further legislation in the property market to protect our health.

T. Schmidt, Quarry Bay

Incinerators' good global track record

Plasma arc is a suitable and proven method for the disposal of small quantities of hazardous waste. However, for household refuse it would use large quantities of energy, and it is definitely neither needed, nor feasible, for the disposal of 3,000 tonnes per day of municipal household waste.

The 'old-fashioned' moving grate technology is fully capable of addressing Lai See's 'noxious chemical cocktail' ('Making a hash of dash to ash', January 4) and hundreds of plants operate worldwide in highly sensitive areas.

To demand that the Environmental Protection Department considers this technology, which is unproven at any commercial scale, for Hong Kong is about as ludicrous as suggesting shooting all our garbage by space rocket into the sun. What is needed is a plant that meets the highest standards in operational efficiencies. That is where the department could learn from my firm.

Alexander Luedi, general manager, Explosion Power Hong Kong Limited