Too much waste to handle? Rubbish
Beware: this site is about to be buried under a mountain of rubbish. The average city dweller is likely to pass by such a notice with no more than a glance, or at most a small prayer of thanks to the urban gods who pay for the refuse trucks and street cleaners that keep his or her doorstep clean. Would they feel any differently if the site in question was Hong Kong? It is unlikely.
The most ancient characteristic of human civilisation is the propensity to generate rubbish. The wealthier a city, the more it produces. One of the comforting factoids of Hong Kong's last 15 years is that the volume of rubbish has risen at more than twice the rate of population increase. The waste explosion means that warnings of Hong Kong's death and decline are unwarranted. The day when Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Zhuhai replace Hong Kong as the Pearl River Delta's rubbish capitals is the time to sell your flat and move up-river. Cities rise and fall, and it is no doubt a sign of Hong Kong's proud ascendance that its denizens take so little notice that they are living, so to speak, on borrowed landfill.
Hong Kong's current approach to rubbish management is not much different from its Neolithic predecessors, who typically piled their waste in nearby mounds - ready for archaeologists to pick through centuries later. It puts its rubbish in landfills in neglected valleys in the New Territories that can hold 100 million tonnes of waste. The problem is that the current landfills will run out of space in as little as four years, at current rates of increase. By 2050, planners estimate that Hong Kong will need space for 500 million tonnes of waste. The Environmental Protection Department (EPD) is running studies and public consultations on alternatives, but since it takes at least 10 years to prepare a new landfill site or build a new incinerator, time has already run out.
Rightly, organisations such as Greenpeace have pointed out the many dangers of incinerators. Green Island Cement's pilot plant to turn waste into cement in Tuen Mun is a case in point. Despite its small scale and recycling objectives, it has been a focal point of protests. Hong Kong's last incinerators were shut down in 1993 and 1997, and nobody has fond memories of them. Waste incineration produces dioxin and heavy metals, a major cause of cancer.
But then, what is a prosperous, booming Hong Kong to do? Even the most radical technology-based solutions only meet the problem halfway. And with limited space, finding new locations for landfill is neither easy nor attractive.
One solution may lie within the community - not in theatrical gestures of protest, or consultations by a government that has already concluded what its policy should be. Coming up with new solutions to managing Hong Kong's rubbish mountain is mountain climbing of a different sort - negotiating compromises and trade-offs, recognising the opportunities and rewards, as well as the limitations of recycling, working with the government rather than against it. Perhaps nowhere in Hong Kong's government are the officials as well trained, earnest or defensive as the technocrats of the EPD. But if they are unable to convince the Hong Kong public of the wisdom of their views, they might as well begin sending the refuse trucks to Victoria Park now. The same is true if the Hong Kong community continues to assume that rubbish is somebody else's problem.
I have to admit that I am not a rubbish expert, but I have at least experienced a society that makes a fetish of recycling. During six years in Tokyo, only once did any of my Japanese neighbours shout at me. That was when I missed the rubbish truck scheduled to pick up recyclables in front of my house, and raced to add my bag to the pile across the street. Every resident follows a strict regime of sorting waste into wet, plastic, other recyclables and bulk, with a fixed daily, weekly and monthly schedule for different types of collection. Japan's example underlines the need for communities in cities to support their own bad habits by taking charge of outcomes. It may not be as sexy as the more far-reaching slogans of democracy, but it's a start.
Edith Terry is a writer based in Hong Kong
