Group offers to buy Hong Kong's waste and use it as a resource
The debate over how to deal with Hong Kong's waste has taken an interesting turn with a non-profit-making organisation offering to buy the municipal solid waste for HK$100 a tonne or HK$24 million a year.
The debate over how to deal with Hong Kong's waste has taken an interesting turn with a non-profit-making organisation offering to buy the municipal solid waste for HK$100 a tonne or US$42 million a year. Capital costs are reckoned to be HK$8 billion.
The government is planning to spend about HK$60 billion building and running an incinerator on Shek Kwu Chau and enlarging and servicing landfill operations.
Zero Waste Smart City Resources Association, chaired by Peter Reid, will today make a offer to the government to manage the city's municipal solid waste as a private commercial enterprise. The aim is to achieve zero waste in Hong Kong by 2020.
"The Offer and Zero Waste 2020 Plan is to transform thinking on Hong Kong's waste to a valuable community resource, which can create up to 6,000 good green jobs in a district-based bioeconomy. A think green, go clean and live cool vision to energise everyone living in Hong Kong," Reid said.
His plan is to buy the 9,000 tonnes of the waste produced daily over 51/2 years from September next year, and to recycle 100 per cent of the waste in each of the city's 18 districts "as a viable, sustainable commercial community business based in each district".
This envisages waste separation at source into six categories using advanced proven digital waste separation technologies and waste applications. Waste collection would be free using electric hybrid vehicles. The food and green waste would be dealt with at district level using anaerobic digestion plants, which would produce fertiliser and fish food.
The recyclables including paper-card, metals, plastics, textiles would again be dealt with at the district level by recycling facilities. The remaining residual fuels waste can be used as fuel feedstock for pyrolysis gasification plants that produce clean gas for input into the gas mains and inert aggregates or sent to plasma gasification plants at power stations.
That is the broad outline of the plan. It also envisages there would be no waste going to landfills or being used as feedstock for mega incinerator projects. "We need to think of waste as a resource, not useless rubbish," said Reid.
In years to come when looking back at events surrounding the Occupy movement, it will be interesting to see who did what, when, where and why.
Take Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying's report on the public consultation for political reform to the National People's Congress in July. Why did he choose to send a report that essentially misrepresented the views of the people of Hong Kong? Did he do it of his own volition, did he do so on the advice of his Hong Kong advisers, or was he following instructions from the central government? Why did the government take so long to speak to the students? We will only know the answers to these and other questions if the government's communications are preserved as records and archived.
This is why the Archive Action Group has written to Leung urging him to "assure the people of Hong Kong that government records relating to constitutional reforms and associated events, including the administration's handling of the people's campaigns for universal suffrage will not be mismanaged or destroyed, until a professional cadre of archivists mandated by arrival legislation is in place to process these records in accordance with international archival standards and best practice."
Sadly, we are sceptical that any such assurance will be forthcoming. It is a shameful state of affairs.
