During the holidays, when I was rearranging furniture for a refurbishment at home, I stumbled upon the Hang Zhou Study Tour Album. Surprisingly, the first memory that came to mind was this when we were cruising around the Saiwoo west river, I saw a sleek white figure galloping towards me. At first I thought I had a burst of excitement; perhaps it was a caroling swan, or an exotic bird, but it turned out that it was merely a discarded plastic bag reflecting upon the sun. A sudden spark of thought came about: if such prominent tourist attraction already has an uncontrollable amount of waste, what should we do with Hong Kongs Waste?

Waste is a common difficulty faced by affluent societies, where affordable products, bringing greater convenience, flood households. Hong Kong is no exception to this problem. Its waste has rapidly risen since 1986 because of an outburst in economic growth. This causes a lot of waste going into landfills everyday, but the three concentrated centres, Tseung Kwan O (South), Ta Kwu Ling (North) and Nim Wan (West), will all reach capacity by 2015, 2017 and 2019 respectively. This is a silent crisis that will doom Hong Kong if we do not act promplty.

Therefore, we need to massively decrease the amount of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW), the most common waste, which includes domestic, commercial and industrial solid waste, making up 45 per cent of the total waste. Thus, exploring a short term solution, I suggest building an integrated waste management facility (IWMF) expanding landfills and implementing a charging system.

However, many people suggest that selfish, narrow-minded Hong Kong citizens believe in the motto Not in my backyard, meaning that they desire for the facility to be built, but never near to them. This caused the integrated waste treatment facility proposals to fail when presented upon the legislative council. The reason why so many people refuse to cooperate in passing of the proposal is due to one vital reason their fear of dioxin, which is a highly toxic chemical that causes cancer. Nonetheless, I still insist on using the IWMF because almost no dioxin would be found in the flue gas. Research show there is gas treatment and filtering systems in the incinerator emission complex and it is only a perception from local residents to believing that it emits dioxin. In addition, people also disagree with expanding the three landfills in Hong Kong, as it would impact on more pollution, and expressing small part of the national park. Yet, the reality is, no waste management facility can fully breakdown waste, and there is still need for a place to store these residues. Thus, by denying the landfill expansions, we are generating more pollution, as over crowding waste would find its way onto the streets, rivers, and even in national parks! Let me ask you a question: Would you rather protect national parks, but live in a pungent, unsanitary place, or would you rather use small plots to store waste, ensuring a comfortable environment to live in? I think most people would choose the second option.

Even though expanding the three landfills and building the IWMF would significantly reduce stored waste, we need to find a concrete solution to diminish its source, thus producing less waste.

That is why a charging system, promoting the 3Rs (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle), and the subsidy in the recycling industry is important in order to accomplish source reduction. The charging scheme is now under consideration and consultation with the government. The principle of this system is wasteful residents will bear harsher fees, and there are 3 factors to determine ones use: by the measurement of water consumption; the use of specialized garbage bags; and charge via management fee.

For the first method, the water authorities would collect trash fee, charging proportionally to the water consumption. For the second method, the government would issue a specially labeled garbage bag, whereby the garbage truck would only collect trash. At the same time, the government would have to minimize the number of trashcans on the streets and install monitoring systems to prevent residents from abusing public trashcans. For the last method, the charge is in proportion to the total floor area and evenly distributed amongst each flat, and the building management company would be responsible for user fee collection.

Another method to source reduction is through promotions. Due to landfill saturation, the government ought to promote the message of source reduction, through commercials, the news, leaflets, or mascots like the litterbug and most importantly, lectures at schools or additional topics in the liberal art studies to make all citizens aware of environmental protection and reduction.

Furthermore, Reuse, Reduce and Recycle (3R) plays a critical role. The 3Rs are derived from the EU Waste Hierarchy. There are 5 options in the waste hierarchy, reduce, meaning to use less material in manufacturing; reuse, signifying to clean, repair, refurbish items for useful daily tools; recycle, turning waste into new products; recovery, including anaerobic digestion, incineration with energy recovery, gasification etcetera; disposing waste in landfills or incinerators without energy recovery. In Hong Kong, residents have mostly been recycling and waste disposal, as seen from more recycling bins , and from continued dumping into the landfill. However, as the crisis approaches, there have been changes to the problem. Now, the government has proposed a campaign called Food Wise, to encourage Hong Kong businesses/organizations in adopting measures to reduce food waste within their establishment. This means that the government encourages people to reduce more waste, which is one step further into saving the environment.

Last but not least, subsidies for the recycling industry also help source reduction. Even though there are numerous recycling bins distributed throughout Hong Kong, 99% of our locally recycled are exported for further overseas processing (mainly China), so that our local waste recycling industry is limited to the primary process phase: recovery, bale and exports. However, this has little economic value, and is only able to create few job opportunities. Also, being too dependent on exports makes the industry vulnerable to external economic factors, such as the global financial tsunami in 2008, which caused the waste paper price plummeting from HK$2,000 to HK$700 per tonne and making the process of recycling profitless and unavoidable. (greenpower.org) Therefore, with this huge problem in the recycling industry, the only way to save the industry is for the government to produce subsidies so that people could open more Eco Parks and would solve the waste exporting problems.

Time is ticking by the second we have to make our choice now, to save Hong Kong, to save the environment, and to save the our planet!