THE contamination of Victoria Harbour may well be Hong Kong's biggest single environmental problem. Pollution of different kinds offends the eyes, assaults the nose and poses a long-term health risk.
So it is disappointing to learn that more than half of the territory's toxic waste is still being dumped in the harbour. The poisoning of this waterway goes on despite the building of a $1.3 billion waste-treatment plant on Tsing Yi island.
The pollution cannot be stopped overnight. The plant is running at only 40 per cent of its capacity and it will be almost a year before it reaches 100 per cent. After that, it will take another two years before all polluters can be blocked: anti-pollution laws will not be in force until the end of 1996.
At the moment, many factory owners are being advised to dump their waste on land or store it for future collection by the plant's operator, Enviropace. Nevertheless, much of the waste still ends up in the harbour.
This is unacceptable.
The director of the Centre for Environmental Technology, Dr Stephen Lam Wing-hong, has some advice for the Environmental Protection Department and Enviropace: help reduce the problems small factory operators have in meeting the storage requirements. For a start, they should be given containers to store their waste. And the minimum of 200 litres required for collection could be reviewed.