dynamco Jun 1st 2013
8:23am

OK, buy some ships and sell the trash to Oslo. Give the profits to the poor. Europe has massive incinerator overcapacity due to their successful recycling efforts so they have a burning problem and compete for feedstocks.
“OSLO This is a city that imports garbage. Some comes from England, some from Ireland. Some is from neighboring Sweden. It even has designs on the American market
“I’d like to take some from the United States,” said Pal Mikkelsen, in his office at a huge plant on the edge of town that turns garbage into heat and electricity. “Sea transport is cheap.”
The problem is not unique to Oslo, a city of 1.4 million people. Across Northern Europe, where the practice of burning garbage to generate heat and electricity has exploded in recent decades, demand for trash far outstrips supply. “Northern Europe has a huge generating capacity,” said Mr. Mikkelsen, 50, a mechanical engineer who for the last year has been the managing director of Oslo’s waste-to-energy agency.
Yet the fastidious population of Northern Europe produces only about 150 million tons of waste a year, he said, far too little to supply incinerating plants that can handle more than 700 million tons. “And the Swedes continue to build” more plants, he said, a look of exasperation on his face, “as do Austria and Germany.”
www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/world/europe/oslo-copes-with-shortage-of-garbage-it-turns-into-energy.html?_r=0

yongms May 31st 2013
10:06am

I recall not too long ago, Mr. Chugani (supported by the expatriates among us) berating the locals on radio and in another of his articles for being racist or prejudiced against the Mainlanders and their behaviour. His opinion appears to have changed. He sees now, the abhorrent behaviour that locals have seen for a long time. Welcome to reality Mr. Chugani.

stoatmonster May 31st 2013
12:01am

Hmmm, this quote from Chugani’s article gave me a sense of deja vu: “Here in Hong Kong, the crude behaviour of mainland visitors is well known – children pooping into shopping bags while riding the MTR, peeing into bottles while eating in restaurants, not queuing up, spitting, and talking too loudly.”
I recall observing similar behaviour amongst certain strata of our Hong Kong society 20 years ago or so. What goes around comes around.

yellow_lynx_cat May 30th 2013
5:46pm

Hong Kong never tried to reduce waste or the extravagence in their packaging. In fact cost of land put a stopper to recycling of a lot of materials (plastics, metals, glass). Even though I tried quite hard to separate my garbage, but I always wonder how much I can help if the Government won’t give hand to help.

mercedes2233 May 30th 2013
5:41pm

If HK has more public toilets, and in more obvious places, it might help. HK residents can go home to their own toilets, but visitors don’t have the same convenience.

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jpinst May 30th 2013
12:56pm

Not so sure about the first paragraph, but the second hits the nail on the head. But he wrong about one thing, I am actually jealous that I cannot **** in a bag on the MTR. It seems rather convenient.

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dynamco May 29th 2013
10:08am

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23160082
Cancer mortality in the vicinity of incinerators
‘Our results support the hypothesis of a statistically significant increase in the risk of dying from
cancer in towns near incinerators + installations for the recovery or disposal of hazardous waste’
www.gainscotland.org.uk/feature_Sint-Niklaas.shtml
‘the change of cancer occurrence has for the last 3 years increased to 4.8 times more
than the Belgian average’
myweb.tiscali.co.uk/freeblackpark/sain/children.htm
‘The report on the Sint Niklaas incinerator showed that blood and glandular cancers appeared in children about 5 years after the incinerator started operating. This preceded the increase in adult cancers by 7 years. Adults cancers showed a five-fold increase over 20 years. Knox found a doubling of childhood cancers + leukaemias within 5km of municipal incinerators greatly exceeding the risk around non-combustion urban sites.
Congenital Abnormalities A recent large study by Dummer over a 37 year period showed that the incidence of spina bifida was 17% higher and heart defects 12% higher near incinerators . Congenital defects of many kinds were found at Sint Niklass . Orofacial defects were found to be more than doubled near an incinerator at Zeeberg Amsterdam. Dolk found a 33% higher incidence of birth defects (86% higher neural tube defects, 50% higher incidence of cardiac septal defects) and a higher risk of chromosomal abnormalities within 3 km of municipal waste

Source URL (retrieved on Jun 1st 2013, 8:24am): http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1248398/something-rotten-city-hong-kong

Subscriber Comments

Naïve Suckers

Green groups told u that u cannot trust a HKG property developer where GREEN means $$$

Public –Private Partnership (PPP)

WWF-Hong Kong believes that Public-Private Partnership (PPP) type approach can be a practical and viable solution for nature conservation on privately owned lands in the right circumstances. In this instance, a small area of the site would develop for residential housing while the majority of the site would be set aside for wetland conservation, funded by the project proponent. By preserving a large area as nature Reserve and committing to long-term conservation and management, the Fung Lok Wai project can preserve and enhance the ecological value of wetlands in Fung Lok Wai, supporting the entire Deep Bay ecosystem.

In 2005, WWF-Hong Kong signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Mutual Luck Investment Limited to ensure that the Fung Lok Wai project complies with Public-Private Partnership approach in which 5% of the site area would be used for housing development, and the remaining 95% of the land would turn into a Wetland Nature Reserve, funded by the project proponent.

www.wwf.org.hk/en/whatwedo/conservation/wetlands/fishponds/funglokwai/rationale/

Published on South China Morning Post (http://www.scmp.com)

Home > Deep Bay project must not start without sound conservation plan

Deep Bay project must not start without sound conservation plan

Saturday, 01 June, 2013, 12:00am

Comment

TREVOR YANG

Trevor Yang says without a wetland trust, housing project will damage the area’s ecological value

The fate of the Deep Bay area can no longer be left to future discussion. It is a place of important ecological value, designated for international protection under the Ramsar wetland convention.

It has taken us decades to make some progress in managing a small part of this wetland system, in the hope of conserving the whole. Yet, Deep Bay’s ecological value has steadily declined. Development has risen to the top of the city’s economic and political agendas.

Deep Bay cannot wait any longer. In the wake of WWF-Hong Kong’s departure from the Fung Lok Wai project, now is the most opportune time to bring all back to the table.

Any discussion of a holistic plan for Deep Bay should be prefaced by an overview of the area’s development history. Marshlands were reclaimed for planting rice 1,000 years ago. In the 1960s and 1970s, many rice paddies in the area were turned into fish ponds for better economic return.

Development caught up in the area with the building of Fairview Park in the mid-1970s, followed by the Tin Shui Wai new town and Palm Springs. Also at that time, land developers bought up the fish ponds and large tracts of farmland.

This, plus the introduction of more commercial fishing practices to meet increasing local demand, began to create challenging conditions for the ecosystem of Inner Deep Bay. In the 1980s, green groups began to ask the government for a holistic conservation management plan. Urban planning discussions can take decades, but time is a luxury nature cannot afford.

The ecological value of fish ponds, which in essence are artificial wetlands, is related to the management practices employed by fish pond farmers. Fish ponds are an integral part of the Deep Bay ecosystem, and fish pond farming is regarded as an example of the wise use of wetlands in a Ramsar site.

In traditional practices, ponds are drained in winter for harvesting. Fish and shrimp with no commercial value are left at the bottom of the pond, and become food for wintering migratory water birds. Deep Bay is home to tens of thousands of these birds each winter.

Over the past two decades, fish pond farming has gravitated towards two extremes. As traditional fish pond farming became less profitable due to competition from the mainland, farmers in Hong Kong began to quit the industry, resulting in an increasing number of abandoned ponds. At the other extreme, commercial fish pond farming expanded around the Deep Bay area.

Abandoned fish ponds gave rise to an invasion of vegetation into the open water, no draining of pond water, and an invasion of exotic species. The rise of commercial fish ponds, on the other hand, led to pond embankments covered with concrete and plastic sheets, fences erected around pond boundaries and devices installed to flush out birds.

Both developments have dramatically reduced the ecological value of Deep Bay.

With about half of the land within and around the Ramsar site privately owned, and considering the challenges of applying a holistic plan to the area, we identified a workable and mutually beneficial option years before the government’s New Nature Conservation Policy in 2004: the public-private partnership approach. In this way, the majority of the Deep Bay site would be set aside for wetland conservation, with long-term funding by a project proponent for its continual management, who would then develop a small portion of the less ecologically sensitive part.

We considered our participation in the Fung Lok Wai project at Deep Bay an important attempt to set a precedent to preserve, and even enhance, the ecological value of the area. But for the partnership to succeed, it is critical to establish a wetland trust; the land ownership, funds and management would be transferred to the trust, which would be overseen by an independent board of both wetland experts and government representatives. The trust could be enlarged, to include other wetlands and funds under one umbrella.

While the Fung Lok Wai project has been approved and the planning application is due for consideration by the Town Planning Board, diverging views still exist among the public, the project proponent and the WWF on critical issues. We hope our withdrawal from this project will allow society to explore and reach a consensus on how best to conserve the important wetlands of the Inner Deep Bay area.

Changes in corporate practice are essential if there is to be real progress in tackling conservation challenges like climate change, clean energy solutions and sustainable use of natural resources.

Key stakeholders need to urgently discuss the development of the Deep Bay area, whose future is complex and involves policies on conservation, land, cultural heritage, agriculture and food security. We owe it to Hong Kong’s natural environment for all parties to come together to engender thorough and continued co-operation.

Trevor Yang is chairman of WWF-Hong Kong

Source URL (retrieved on May 31st 2013, 8:03pm): http://www.scmp.com/comment/article/1250621/deep-bay-project-must-not-start-without-sound-conservation-plan