Government-approved rubbish bags are on sale at Pricerite in Hong Kong’s Kowloon Bay district on January 26. Repeated delays in enacting the city’s waste charging scheme and the reduced number of buildings for its trial roll-out have damaged confidence in the government’s ability to successfully pull off the full scheme. Photo: Jelly Tse
Opinion
Alice Wu
Alice Wu
With a trial run this modest, can Hong Kong’s waste charging scheme succeed?
The pilot programme was supposed to show Hongkongers how the waste charging scheme works, but a tiny trial run and multiple delays inspire little confidence
This is bad for public perception and adds fuel to the fire of speculation whether the government will actually implement the scheme in full on August 1
A trial run of the pay-as-you-throw waste charging scheme begins today, on April 1. Anyone unaware of it can be forgiven as the government is carrying out the pilot scheme in just 14 premises. There are about 50,000 buildings in Hong Kong, meaning that the government is running an incredibly small trial involving only 0.003 per cent of the buildings in the city.
Exactly how the trial run will tell the government how the public understands the policy, as Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu has said, is anyone’s guess.
The government has scaled down the list of buildings designated for the trial run. That means it initially wanted to have more, which makes sense, but in the end decided against that, for reasons that are still unclear. The public and lawmakers are scratching their heads over the government’s lack of ambition, with Legislative Council environmental affairs panel chairman Edward Lau Kwok-fan calling the sample size “miserably small” and raising doubt over whether the data collected would even be useful.
Given the number of people expressing reservations about the scheme’s feasibility, it seems the third time is not the charm. It is rare to see this many open expressions of reservations in Hong Kong’s current political system.
The 14 designated premises include two public housing blocks with 750 households in Tsuen Wan and Chai Wan, three single-block private residential buildings in Kowloon City and Sham Shui Po, four eateries, two residential care homes in Tuen Mun, two shopping centres in Tuen Mun and Tai Po and the West Kowloon Government Offices, which house 2,500 employees from eight departments.
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SCMP Explains: How does Hong Kong handle its waste?
SCMP Explains: How does Hong Kong handle its waste?
The pilot programme was supposed to help demonstrate to the wider public how the waste charging scheme works. To not have the office of the Environmental Protection Department or the Environment and Ecology Bureau included raises a few red flags.
Secretary for Environment and Ecology Tse Chin-wan had vowed in January that “some government buildings” would take the lead by demonstrating the waste charging scheme, but that “some” became “one”.
Tse’s bureau and the department responsible for the scheme not taking part in leading the way gives the impression of a government that is not willing to back up its words with action. This is bad for public perception and adds fuel to the fire of speculation whether the government will actually implement the scheme in full on August 1 after delaying it twice.
Is the sample size and selection representative enough to serve its purpose and inform the government of the public’s response? The trial doesn’t include schools, recreational facilities, hospitals or hotels, all of which have different waste disposal practices and needs. Surely this is the kind of information that matters and what the government needs to have a clear and full understanding of before fully implementing the waste charging levy. Why are they not being studied by the government?
All of these raise the important question of whether Tse’s bureau has the capacity to keep a handle on the scheme’s roll-out. If even the pilot scheme period is botched, there’s no question that a citywide implementation will be, too.
Kwai Tsing District Council member Jody Kwok Fu-yung (left) and Secretary for Environment and Ecology Tse Chin-wan meet the media after a briefing on municipal solid waste charging at the government headquarters in Admiralty on January 26. Tse has explained that the waste charging scheme is not about the money but the way residents dispose of their rubbish. Photo: Edmond So
For more than two months since the announcement of the second delay to the scheme, were Tse and his bureau just sitting on their hands? Or worse, did they decide to scale down – rather than step up – efforts to make the implementation happen?
Even more worrying is that the government seems aligned in its bureaucratese. What they say point to a lot of wiggle room.
Lee has said that it was “too early” to decide if changes to the scheme were needed, adding that the government was willing to “listen to views” and would decide “the way forward as we go through the exercise and learn from the experience”.
Meanwhile, Tse said the government would decide the next step by June after the trial run. He also made clear it was keeping “an open mind” when it comes to adjustments, coordination, and the possibility that “big changes [to the scheme] might be needed”.
It seems clear the only handle the government has on the waste-charging scheme, which has been in the works in the last 20 years, is a mop handle. Its only solution to the problem of ineffective implementation is to cut the process into pieces, just as it once suggested residents saw their mop handles into smaller pieces for disposal.
Alice Wu is a political consultant and a former associate director of the Asia Pacific Media Network at UCLA
