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The Environment
From the environmental protection perspective, livestock farming in urbanised Hong Kong is not sustainable in the long term. To address the problem, the Government introduced voluntary licence-surrender schemes in 2005 and 2006 to encourage respectively poultry and pig farmers to cease livestock farming permanently, in return for ex gratia payments. The schemes have decreased the number of pig and poultry farms and reduced the pollution load on the environment. The number of poultry farms has been further reduced by a buyout scheme launched in 2008.
Sewage Treatment and Disposal
Victoria Harbour and HATS
At present, the public sewerage system serves 93 per cent of the population and collects about 2.8 million cubic metres of waste water every day. About 70 per cent of the collected sewage receives chemical or higher levels of treatment before being discharged.
The Harbour Area Treatment Scheme (HATS) Stage 1 collects sewage from the urban areas of Kowloon, Tsuen Wan, Kwai Tsing, Tseung Kwan O and the north-eastern part of Hong Kong Island and transports it through a network of deep tunnels to Stonecutters Island for treatment. HATS Stage 2A involves extending the deep tunnel system to take the untreated sewage from the remaining parts of Hong Kong Island to the Stonecutters Island Sewage Treatment Works, which will be expanded to provide centralised chemical treatment to sewage from the entire HATS catchment. HATS Stage 2A works commenced in 2009 and is scheduled for commissioning in 2015. Since commissioning in 2010, the Advance Disinfection Facilities have reduced sewage pathogens in the Western Harbour and at the Tsuen Wan beaches. Together with the completion of a local sewerage network and progressive connection to local residents' houses in the vicinity of the Tsuen Wan beaches, this has improved the waters at seven previously closed beaches so that they now comply with the Water Quality Objective for bathing beaches and have been re-opened. The government plans to commission a consultancy study on further enhancing the quality of Victoria Harbour's coastal waters.
Apart from HATS, the government has spent a further $27 billion on other sewerage schemes since 1991 and will spend another $15 billion on schemes over the next five years, including sewerage for rural villages. The Water Pollution Control (Sewerage) Regulation empowers the EPD to direct house owners to connect their waste water pipes to new public sewers and since the regulation came into force in 1995, over 8,000 village houses have made connections to the public sewers.
Sewage disposal facilities in the rural areas
Improvements continue to sewage disposal facilities in the rural areas of the New Territories and in 2013 the government drew up plans to invest further in projects providing public sewers to convey domestic discharges from villages in rural and other un-sewered areas to sewage treatment works. Loan and grant schemes for eligible householders to connect houses to public sewers are available.
In 2014, the government commenced preliminary works for a consultancy study on providing public sewerage to villages in the West Kowloon and Tsuen Wan areas.
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