Dumping effluent no solution
THE Sewage (Strategic Disposable) Scheme is being persisted with by the Government with all the inflexibility at its command and, apparently, careless of annoying mainland China. Why? The objections are mainly environmental and the Government has often said that it cares about the environment. The objections are closely reasoned and make a great deal of sense. What bureaucratic intransigence, or other unrevealed reason, prompts the Government to react not with any desire to reach a consensus, but with an increasingly more virulent proseltysing of its original proposals? What prompts it to decline even to examine alternatives? Does it just want to go hell for leather and complete as much as possible before 1997 and if so why is that? The advantages of the scheme are patent, of course. It is a total fix solution designed to meet current and future needs. Subsequent development can fit into it, as per agreed planning and development policies and plans, free of constraint by already arranged sewage disposal with limited capacity. No difficulty in locating treatment installations arises. Large scale civil work is involved and will be carried out by comparably large international contractors. The offending, only primary treated, effluent is removed a long distance from Hong Kong. An incidental advantage arises in the aggrandisement of land values along the route.
But the disadvantages are even more cogent. The heart of the scheme is a network of interconnected collection pipes going into an underground outfall. The long, very long pipelines, eventually discharge into the China Sea near some islands by the China coast where a PLA holiday camp is at present situated.
Similar schemes are being introduced in England, where once again the effluent is treated only to the primary stage, causing great controversy. The scheme here is well advanced already and the more it proceeds the more difficult and expensive it becomes to alter or stop, although it is designed to proceed by stages. When the first phase is completed the effluent, at that stage, will be discharged into the western harbour near Stonecutters Island. The scheme requires heavy 'up-front' capital investment and will be extremely costly.
In essence the pollution problem is not dealt with but shifted to China's coast. That is not the way to deal with an environmentally unfriendly (le mote juste?) Problem. And if the system blocks or malfunctions it could well take some time to remedy during which period Hong Kong instead of shifting the problem to the mainland could well find itself up to its neck in the unacceptably treated effluent. The Chinese, very reasonably, ask that wherever the scheme eventually goes, the effluent should be treated so that, for Hong Kong or other waters, it is environmentally acceptable. Just dumping unacceptable effluence on China is no solution at all, for either China or Hong Kong.
JOHN BARTON Legal Affairs Spokesman Hong Kong Democratic Foundation