Waste companies and government guilty of obstructive inertia
Ségolène Royal, the French minister for ecology, sustainable development and energy, recently stated that incineration is an obsolete technology and we should be moving towards a zero-waste society.
Gustave Flaubert, the famous French author, wrote that "Le bon Dieu est dans le detail" - God is in the detail. The phrase has also been attributed to the French architect Le Corbusier and the modern American-German architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
A deliberate variation on the phrase is "The Devil is in the detail", meaning it is easy to come up with a grand overall plan for something, but difficult to justify that plan when all the detailed questions show up.
In the context of waste management, Ségolène Royal, the French minister for ecology, sustainable development and energy, recently stated that incineration is an obsolete technology and we should be moving towards a zero-waste society.
French multinationals Veolia Environnement and SITA - a subsidiary of Suez Environnement - are effectively a waste duopoly in Hong Kong. In France, the official waste "valorisation", or the value creation rate from waste recycling, for these two companies is said to be around 70 per cent. By comparison, in Hong Kong the figure for the same companies is around 0.25 per cent.
Their global slogans translate as "making waste into a resource" and "global but local". They and Au need to explain why these slogans don't apply in Hong Kong. Judging by local figures, their slogan should be "do nothing at all".