HONG KONG URBAN COUNCIL
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in our July meeting. All in all, I hope the views expressed by Members today will not affect the future work of the committee. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Steven Hung Chung-Fun (in Cantonese):--Mr. CHAN Kwok-leung of the Democratic Party mentioned capitalism just now. Let me go briefly into the characteristics of capitalism. The first one is economy. Economy comes from production and production gives rise to risks faced by the human kind today. We produce many products day in day out and they in the end become waste. Waste management is the topic of my discussion today.
Let me state first that I object to the motion. The Chairman just now mentioned a lot of things and Members did not have queries. In fact, the Chairman chose to mention the good things without the bad ones. The Chairman said an area of 20 000 square metres would suffice for the construction of a central incineration plant. Let me ask about the storage capacity of this central incineration plant. Some colleagues earlier visited Macau and the central incineration plant there. I want to remind Members that it can only handle 900 tonnes of waste per day. Our refuse transfer station in Kowloon Bay transfers 1 700 tonnes of waste per day. I am saying that for East Kowloon alone, we need to handle 1 700 tonnes of waste. By that ratio, how many incineration plants do we need in Hong Kong? I have reservations regarding the area of 20 000 square metres.
Finding a large site is of course a problem. I want to point out the real problem here. I mean to say that handling waste by incineration suggests that we are helpless in tackling waste. We are putting up our hands to surrender. We are saying that we cannot curb waste generation. All we can do is to burn waste and reduce its volume. I want to remind Members that the percentage of reduction will be less than 30%, from a rough estimate of mine. As Mr. Chan Kwok-leung pointed out, an incineration plant would be a supporting facility because not all categories of waste would be suitable for burning. Incineration is not an environmentally friendly approach to waste. Take furniture for example. Many people of Hong Kong replace their furniture and a lot of waste timber is generated. One way to handle this is to make use of landfills for a natural bio-degradation, thereby creating a biological chain. If we burn the timber products, no biological chain will be created.
Waste generated here in Hong Kong is somewhat different from waste in foreign countries. The Chairman mentioned that domestic waste had an organic content. In fact, the organic content of our waste is not as high as waste elsewhere because we use more paper and plastic bags. I would like to remind Members about this.
We should not be over-enthusiastic about incineration plants for power generation. Sai Cho Wan in Kwun Tong used to be a landfill and collection of methane from dumping should be possible. The business and industrial sector of Kwun Tong was invited to make use of the methane for power generation.
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