Controversial Shek Kwu Chau incinerator likely to be approved by Legco
The controversial Shek Kwu Chau incinerator is likely to be approved by the Legislative Council finance committee today.
The controversial Shek Kwu Chau incinerator is likely to be approved by the Legislative Council finance committee today. The government is planning to spend HK$60 billion on building and running an incinerator on the island south of Lantau and on enlarging and servicing landfill operations.
The scheme is controversial for a number of reasons. Proponents say that 99 per cent of the particulate matter from the plant can be captured. Others are not so sure. In 2008 several doctors' associations (which included environmental chemists and toxicologists) wrote to the European Parliament with concerns over incinerator particle emissions and the absence of specific fine and ultra-fine particle size monitoring or in depth industry/government epidemiological studies of these minute and invisible incinerator particle size emissions.
The proposed incinerator will produce up to 1,000 tonnes of toxic bottom ash a day from the 3,000 tonnes of waste that will be fed into it. This will have to be neutralised and dumped in landfills. Alternative technology, particularly plasma vaporisation has been dismissed by the government as inappropriate. Yet it is being increasingly adopted by authorities around the world including China because it is cleaner and more efficient.
There are no emissions and whatever isn't vaporised is left as non-toxic vitrified slag. These plants also produce commercially usable syngas which can be converted into electricity or biofuels.
One entrepreneur believes he can make money out of processing Hong Kong's waste. Peter Reid, managing director of Zero Waste Smart City Resources Association, said his scheme would save HK$130 billion of public spending and through recycling anaerobic digestion and plasma vaporisation would result in zero waste with nothing going to landfill. He says he could have the scheme up and running by 2018, several years before the government incinerator.
Unsurprisingly the government has not responded to his offer.
We return to the Hong Kong government report we mentioned yesterday: Report on Recent Community and Political Situation in Hong Kong.
While yesterday's piece focused, as they say, on the "bigger picture", today we include a few gobbets to illustrate the extent of its banality. On page 37: "A press conference was held daily by the representatives of the Hong Kong Police Force and Fire Services Department starting from 30 September."
A few pages later we read an interesting interpretation of one country two systems: "The HKSAR Basic Law Committee Deputy Director Elsie Leung Oi-sie said on a television programme that if Hong Kong people could better grasp 'One Country, Two Systems' in future and accept that Hong Kong is a directly-controlled municipality under the People's Republic of China, then the threshold for the CE election need not be set too high." Ah, so that's what "a high degree of autonomy" means.
The report draws a veil over Exco member Laura Cha's remarks comparing demonstrations for democracy in Hong Kong to giving the vote to emancipated black slaves in the US, even though they were reported around the world. Similarly there was no mention of CY Leung's comments that extending the vote to poorer people would introduce the risk of populist policies that would threaten the rich, despite also making global headlines.
Readers will recall there was considerable huffing and puffing by a number of important people about the influence of "foreign forces". But there was no room in the report for this weighty issue.
