Download PDF : Lettertoeditor
Incineration – Solid Waste Disposal
Incinerator
The [SKC] incinerator will be equipped with the so-called “latest” moving grate technology, which was inspired by a study of Germany’s incinerators six years ago.
[next already on clear the air blog:]
“With its very good facilities for incinerating hazardous waste, Germany is assuming a part of the general environmental responsibility,” says Environmental Minister Sigmar Gabriel from the Social Democrat Party (SPD). Gabriel argues that disposing of the waste in Germany is still safer than letting it be improperly deposited elsewhere or dumped into the sea. But in future, the Social Democrat would like to see the waste exporters build their own incinerators — ideally with technology made in Germany.
China — not noted for its environmental concerns until now — seems to want to realize Gabriel’s vision. Two up-to-date hazardous waste incinerating facilities will now be built in Beijing and in an industrial park in the northwest of the country — using German know-how.
Claudia Baitinger from BUND, the German chapter of Friends of the Earth, said the statistics hide some important facts.
Burning garbage remains a large waste of resources, even where it is used to generate power and heat for homes. “Resources are being squandered here,” she said, pointing out that the resources that are turned to fuel required energy to create in the first place.
“The hierarchy of waste management is still upside down,” said Baitinger. “Appeals are based on this order: prevention, reuse, recycling and at the very end disposal. In reality, it happens the other way around.”
She doubts the extent to which Germany is saving waste from landfill.
Residual waste cannot be eliminated
SCMP
He presumably wants to sell German incinerators to Hong Kong ?
http://china.ahk.de/about-us/contact-us-in/hong-kong/
Environment and Sustainability
| Mr. Wolfgang Ehmann Executive Director ehmann.wolfgang@hongkong.ahk.de |
| May 23, 2012 |
|
||||
|
Residual waste cannot be eliminated Your correspondents’ many commentaries on waste incineration are certainly well intended, but often miss the point and some statements claimed as fact remain unsubstantiated. Firstly, the residue of the incineration process is not toxic sludge, as stated in one letter, but ashes, which can be used, for example, in building construction. Second, the moving grate technology, unlike the plasma arc method, is proven and tested for large-scale incineration plants, like the one proposed to be constructed in Hong Kong. Thirdly, recycling is often presented as the alternative to incineration. This would be true only if a 100 per cent waste recovery rate was practically achievable. Fourth, many readers pick on the administration as the main culprit for not having solved the problem long ago. This is a rather low-hanging fruit to pick, as it conveniently overlooks the fact, that whatever initiatives the government may propose, they have to pass legislation and stakeholder scrutiny before they can be implemented. The endless debate around the plastic bag levy is a shining example of just how tedious the process can be. A financial burden is normally the main reason for public resistance against any such regulations, but in this case payment could easily be avoided by bringing your own bag. Still, it took three years to pass the levy into law. How long will it take, then, to get a meaningful domestic waste charging scheme or waste electronic and electrical equipment regulations passed? To decide on a strategy to deal with its waste is a community effort. Recovery and recycling are vital components of such a strategy, but there is no known live example, anywhere in the world, where residual waste is completely eliminated from the economic cycle. It would be a great leap forward, if the people of Hong Kong recycled their waste as enthusiastically as the opponents of waste incineration do with their arguments against the latter. Wolfgang Ehmann, Admiralty |
|||||
Granting of legal aid adds fuel to the fire in battle over incinerator
SCMP
| LAI SEE Howard Winn May 11, 2012 |
|
||||
|
Those working to block government plans to build an incinerator on Shek Kwu Chau are cock-a-hoop at the Legal Aid Department’s decision to grant aid to two Cheung Chau residents and one from Lantau who want to apply for a judicial review of decisions taken by the Environmental Protection Department, the Town Planning Board and Exco with respect to the incinerator. The granting of legal aid means there is a sufficient basis for proceeding and has created a degree of confidence among those objecting to the incinerator that leave to apply for a judicial review will be granted over government objections at a court hearing that starts on June 7. If leave to apply for review is granted, this will put the government in the position of paying to sue itself, as occurred with the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge. Work on the incinerator is at present suspended after Legco’s environmental panel declined to approve the EPD’s plans. However objectors believe that as long as the outline zoning plan to build a 3,000- tonne-per day mass-burn incinerator on an artificial island close to the shore remains in existence, then they should continue with the judicial review. At the same time, the arguments over the type of technology that should be employed continue. Conventional mass-burn incinerators, the objectors say, produce dangerously toxic emissions, and some of them have been closed down around the world for this reason. They argue instead for gas plasma incinerators that produce little in the way of emissions, according to the manufacturers. They can variously produce jet fuel or syngas, which can generate electricity. Various city and regional authorities have in the past few years started to build gas plasma waste-to-energy operations, though nothing on the scale of 3,000 tonnes a day. Several firms have produced proposals and asked to speak to the EPD. One firm has even offered to install and operate a gas plasma waste-to-energy operation at no charge to the government, as it believes it will make money from the project. However, the EPD has refused to see these firms. Its consultants, Aecom, apparently believe that it is not suitable for Hong Kong, though its US counterpart evidently has a different view. “We believe that this technology is not only environmentally friendly but ready for large-scale commercialisation,” Aecom’s Mike Zebel said in the US. |
|||||
Incinerator opponents granted legal aid
SCMP
| Cheung Chi-fai May 11, 2012 |
|
||
|
Three people have won legal aid to mount court challenges to government plans for a massive waste incinerator beside an outlying island – even though the project is on hold. Kwok Cheuk-kin and Leung Hon-wai, both Cheung Chau residents, and Ho Loy, who lives on Lantau, have filed three separate judicial reviews against the Environmental Protection Department project. It is understood their cases will be heard initially at the High Court on June 7, during which environment officials will present evidence to argue that they should be halted. If the court grants leave to any of the cases, further hearings will be conducted. The government had sought funding for the HK$23 billion, 3,000-tonne capacity incinerator off Shek Kwu Chau, near Cheung Chau, but said last month the request would not proceed in the life of the present government. Five government decisions will be scrutinised in the three cases. They include the decisions of the Town Planning Board to adopt and the Executive Council to approve an outline zoning plan for Shek Kwu Chau and an artificial island next to it on which the burner would be built. They will also question the Executive Council’s approval to authorise dredging and reclamation work off the southwest coast of Shek Kwu Chau, and the environment department’s decisions to approve the environmental impact assessment report and issue an environmental permit for the incinerator. Ho said these decisions were all problematic and should be overturned. “There are also questions of the independence of the consultant which carried out the study and why the government favoured Shek Kwu Chau though an alternative site in Tsang Tsui, Tuen Mun, was more suitable,” Ho said. It is not certain whether the three will hire the same lawyer. Kwok said he had contacted lawyer Albert Ho Chun-yan, but he sensed that the Democratic Party chairman and legislator was hesitant about taking the case, although he had not ruled it out. |
|||
Shek Kwu Chau Incinerator Judicial Reviews
The Legal Aid department has today granted legal aid certificates to all three persons of standing in their separate judicial reviews of decisions made by HK Government regarding the rezoning of Shek Kwu Chau and other matters concerning the incinerator Environmental Impact Assessment and other salient matters.
Loud bangs then fire at Tuas incinerator
http://news.asiaone.com/News/Latest%2BNews/Singapore/Story/A1Story20120506-344097.html
ASIAONE
NEWS
SINGAPORE
Loud bangs then fire at Tuas incinerator
AsiaOne
Sunday, May 06, 2012
SINGAPORE – An incinerator at a waste management plant in Tuas caught fire early Sunday morning. According to witness statements, three loud bangs were heard before flames were sighted.
An eyewitness told the Straits Times that technicians on duty were transporting oil sludge into a funnel leading to the incinerator when they heard the three loud explosive bangs, followed by the flames.
The technicians then sounded the alarm and left the control room, which reportedly caught fire just seconds later.
The roof also partially collapsed, reported the English daily.
The Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) said they were alerted to the fire at around 12.50am at Eco SWM, inTuas. Deploying three fire engines, SCDF officers put out the fire within 30 minutes of their arrival.
A SCDF spokesperson said that all 25 employees who were onsite when the incident happened are accounted for. No injuries have been reported.
Incinerator particle risks are ignored at our peril
Thursday, May 03, 2012
Western Morning News
Follow.
It is a well known fact that dozens of new incinerators are poised to
spring up all over Britain and the public are entitled to ask why is the
UK so far behind the United States in concerns over possible health
risks to the public.
Incineration of waste, apart from destroying valuable resources,
produces emissions including fine particles known as PM2.5 (in diameter)
and these can be absorbed straight into the blood.
In 1997 the United States passed tough new laws requiring coal-fired
power stations and incinerators to measure PM2.5 continually and control
emissions.
The new laws followed a series of articles in the New England Journal of
Medicine including studies from the Harvard Air Effects Institute which
found a strong association with overall mortality, cardiovascular deaths
and lung cancer.
The regulations were unsuccessfully challenged by the power companies
and were upheld by the US Supreme Court as the evidence of the dangers
of PM2.5 was undeniable.
In this country, by contrast, the Health Protection Agency has
repeatedly said that modern incinerators when well run cause very little
damage to public health. This has suited the government because
incinerators, although expensive when built and financed with Private
Finance Initiative (PFI) results in the government having to pay less EU
landfill tax. It is interesting to note that there is no evidence of any
HPA research into the dangers of PM2.5 from incinerators available to
the UK public. I wonder why.
In 2009-2010 the Commons Environmental Audit Committee did put out a
report stating that “the costs and health impacts of fine particle PM2.5
air pollution is almost twice that of obesity and physical inactivity”.
To fulfil the Environment Agency operating permit PM2.5 are not
continually measured and incinerator companies have only to send
measurements from their emission stacks once a year.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs admits to having
62 monitoring stations across the UK for PM2.5, particle emissions, none
of them anywhere near an incinerator.
I wonder why.
Officials’ irrational decision-making to blame for delay in incinerator plans
SCMP
| Tom Yam says officials have only themselves to blame for the delay in incinerator plans – their choice of location fails an objective assessment | |||||
May 03, 2012 |
|
||||
|
Legislators should be applauded for withholding support for a HK$15 billion waste incinerator to be built on Shek Kwu Chau, leaving the issue to incoming chief executive Leung Chun-ying’s administration. The current administration has clearly botched the job. Many would agree with the government that incineration is part of the solution to Hong Kong’s waste disposal problem, but where to put the incinerator? The Environmental Protection Department decided it should be built on Shek Kwu Chau, and cast local opposition as “not in my neighbourhood” resistance by residents in the vicinity. In fact, the real issue is the department’s unprofessional and indefensible decision-making that led to the selection of a site in an ecologically sensitive area, instead of an existing industrial zone – the Tsang Tsui ash lagoons in Tuen Mun. The department failed to make an objective analysis and comprehensive comparison of the two sites. Its documents and presentations are biased towards its selection, describing only the advantages of Shek Kwu Chau. Any unbiased comparison clearly shows Tsang Tsui to be the better choice for environmental, economic and technical reasons. Two consultants engaged by the department studied the feasibility of both sites under 20 criteria. It’s easy even for a layman to see from their reports that Tsang Tsui is the better site in 12 criteria: engineering, technical and economic, less ecological impact, more efficient land use. Only one factor favours Shek Kwu Chau: lower transport costs. Both sites were rated the same under the four criteria of air quality, noise, landscape and hazard. The department provided no information for one criterion (operational cost), another was irrelevant (land ownership) and the remaining one was not addressed (community impact on Tuen Mun, Cheung Chau and South Lantau). Construction of an incinerator in Tsang Tsui would cost 26 per cent less than in Shek Kwu Chau (in 2011 prices) and be completed two years earlier. Massive land reclamation, seabed dredging and cable laying would be required to create the infrastructure in Shek Kwu Chau and this would have a severe impact on fisheries and wildlife habitats. In contrast, the site in Tsang Tsui is ready in situ among existing waste treatment facilities. Its location offers land and sea routes for transporting waste to the incinerator and removing ash to the nearby landfill. In spite of Tsang Tsui’s clear advantages, the department belatedly introduced a new criterion, “balanced spatial distribution”, as the key reason for choosing Shek Kwu Chau. In other words, since Tuen Mun already has waste treatment facilities, we should spread the problem around the rest of Hong Kong. This is precisely what Lau Wong-fat, Heung Yee Kuk chairman and Tuen Mun district councillor, said in January 2008, the day after the consultants hired by the department issued a report giving Tuen Mun the highest rating as an incinerator site. Lau was reported to have said: “We already have a power plant and landfills. Why can’t they pick another spot for the incinerator?” Four years later, the Environmental Protection Department did exactly that. Tom Yam is a Hong Kong-based management consultant. He holds a doctorate in electrical engineering and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania |
|||||
Tsang has poor track record
SCMP letter May 2, 2012
Robert Lang said Hong Kong people should focus on the “good decisions” Donald Tsang Yam-kuen made during his time as chief executive, but he failed to list what they were (“Chief’s perks of office well deserved”, April 27).
Leung Chun-ying, our leader-in-waiting, is already in the news for various reasons, ranging from his personal wealth to glimpses of what we might expect to see from him as chief executive.
However, it already seems confidence in Mr Leung is high, as are the expectations of the people of Hong Kong.
Mr Leung will not have very big boots to fill so it would seem all the right ingredients are there, but it remains to be seen whether they will be mixed into a government that listens to what people want instead of just doing things, regardless.
The incinerator which was proposed for Shek Kwu Chau is a good example of bad government policy.
The debacle over this planned project goes on. Thankfully, it has been stopped in its tracks for the time being, largely because of pressure from the residents of Lantau, the general public and various concern groups – a job well done by all.
However, the burning question is how this cheap, outdated method of incineration got on the drawing board in the first place.
There are much cleaner and more efficient methods available that produce energy in the process (gasification) and there are also more suitable locations for such a waste facility.
If we do end up with an incinerator (very likely, given that we are a throwaway society), would the government consider land reclamation further south, into the South China Sea, so no one needs to be concerned about exhaust fumes from the plant? Shek Wu Chau is not the right place for an incinerator of any kind for reasons we are all aware of.
Andrew Maxwell, Sai Kung