Lawmakers must back Hong Kong's own plant for recycling e-waste
Edwin Lau says it will ease pressure on landfills and protect public health
Four years after the end of public consultations on producer-responsibility legislation for waste electrical and electronic equipment, the Environment Bureau is finally going to seek approval for HK$536 million in funding from lawmakers to build the first-ever large-scale plant in Hong Kong to dismantle and recycle locally generated electronic waste.
According to the government, Hong Kong produces 70,000 tonnes of electronic waste a year, 80 per cent of which is exported for reuse or recycling, while the rest is disposed of in our landfills.
Even the government cannot say whether such a huge amount of exported electronic waste is recycled safely, without causing secondary pollution. Thus Hong Kong desperately needs proper facilities to treat electronic waste, so we are not simply passing on our problem to someone else.
Electronic waste contains heavy metals and toxins that can be released when being dismantled, including mercury, cadmium and lead. Media reports have highlighted that the dismantling of electronic waste in some developing countries has polluted underground water, soil and ambient air, which has seriously affected the health of workers and people living nearby.
The government plans to set up a plant to deal with such waste, along with legislation to mandate importers and distributors pay for the building of it and the HK$200 million annual running costs, to ensure Hong Kong adopts a responsible attitude to tackling e-waste. If the producer-responsibility legislation is passed by the Legislative Council, importers and distributors will be required to pay upfront when the five kinds of electrical and electronic equipment - namely refrigerators, air conditioners, washing machines, television sets and computers - are imported and sold in Hong Kong. However, the government needs money from the treasury to get the plant up and running first.
Similar legislation has been around in many jurisdictions for decades; South Korea enacted laws in 1992, Taiwan in 1998, and Sweden and Japan in 2001. Clearly, they foresaw the environmental problems that would result from the proliferation of many new types of electrical and electronic products in the information technology era.