Clear The Air News Blog Rotating Header Image

August 18th, 2013:

Glass recyclers race cleaners to reach empty bottles in Lan Kwai Fong and Soho

Aug 18th, 2013
by Editor.
No comments yet

Sunday, 18 August, 2013, 12:00am

News›Hong Kong

ENVIRONMENT

Olivia Rosenman olivia.rosenman@scmp.com

Green workers strive to collect city’s mountain of waste glass for reuse

For many Hongkongers, a typhoon signal late in the week might cause concern over the weekend’s junk boat trip or long-awaited alfresco wedding. Others may be pleased that they can get a day off work.

But for April Lai, the head of Green Glass Green, one of Hong Kong’s few glass recycling groups, it provokes anxiety about bags of bottles on Soho’s streets.

One Thursday morning in 2011, a No 8 typhoon signal saw the city shut down – as it did last week. But Lai didn’t appreciate the time off work. She spent the morning glued to the radio, willing the storm to pass. It wasn’t the drunken revellers she feared, but the street cleaners, who were also waiting and would then take off the streets the bottles that Lai sought to recycle. When finally Typhoon Nesat blew over, Lai found none of her usual truck drivers had the time for her pick-up. Frantic phone calls finally yielded someone willing to make the trip, and she just managed to beat the street cleaners. But she is always alert of the risks to her work, and sometimes the odds are stacked up against her.

Every day, Hong Kong produces close to 9,000 tonnes of municipal solid waste in its homes, shops and businesses. That’s around 1.3kg per person each day. Waste glass makes up 3 per cent, the vast majority of it glass bottles, mostly containing alcoholic drinks. Waste glass is heavy, bulky and does not break down easily. It is also steadily flowing into Hong Kong’s brimming landfills. Around 100,000 tonnes of glass bottles are dumped in landfills every year.

At 7am on Saturday, just down from the doors of Hotel LKF on Wyndham Street, Avi, a businessman, surveys a mountain of rubbish on the footpath.

“Every weekend it’s like this,” he says. “They only stopped partying an hour ago.”

Lai and her crew are knee-deep in bags of rubbish, stinking and sodden from the overnight downpour. The street is quiet, except for the occasional roar of a passing truck and the tinkle of glass as Lai and her colleagues empty bags of it into a skip to be loaded onto her truck.

Green Glass Green collects glass three mornings a week, mostly in Wan Chai and Soho.

It’s back-breaking, smelly work and it only makes a small reduction in the mountain of glass waste generated by the city’s bar-hoppers.

Less than 5 per cent of Hong Kong’s waste glass is recycled. Around 250 tonnes of discarded glass bottles are sent to Hong Kong’s landfills every day. That is an equivalent in weight to 140 of the taxis that transport many of Soho’s revellers home after they’ve finished draining the contents of those same bottles.

As sweaty men in tight jeans stumble past, clutching kebabs, Lai tirelessly loads bottles into three-tonne trucks that transport them to recycler Tiostone Environmental in Tuen Mun.

She is full of remarkable strength and energy for someone so petite and it’s hard to keep up with her as she strides between collection points along Hollywood Road and Wyndham Street.

Along the way she picks up several stray bottles – each a “one for the road” that didn’t quite make it home.


From unwanted bottles to useful bricks

Aug 18th, 2013
by Editor.
No comments yet

Online comments

dynamco Aug 18th 2013 9:19am

This Tiostone concept emanated from the HK Polytechnic where Dixon Chan & Chi Sun Poon wrote papers on incorporating waste materials into Eco-glass bricks
www.laputa-eco.com/FlowChart.html

However they use flyash in the product & the jury Is still out on whether such can be encapsulated without leaching the toxic heavy metals found in flyash from coal combustion.


www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6775608n

60 minutes video on coal ash

“Even the EPA has promoted the reuse of coal ash in manufacturing, but an inspector general’s report issued earlier this year found that in allowing the reuse of coal ash, the agency had not sufficiently assessed the environmental risk of a material which, in its second life as a wallboard or a road surface, still contains the original toxic compounds. (Care to re-do the baby’s room with sheet rock that contains dioxins, lead, mercury and cadmium?)”
www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Fly_ash


“On November 2, 2009 the EPA Office of Inspector General (OIG) announced in a report that a formal investigation into the EPA’s “partnership” with the coal industry to market coal ash reuse in consumer, agricultural & industrial products was underway. The report also criticized the EPA for not releasing a report about cancer risks associated to the exposure of coal ash until March of 2009, a full seven years after the study was completed.”
www.publicintegrity.org/2012/04/06/8612/impact-environmental-groups-sue-epa-over-lack-coal-ash-regulation

South China Morning Post

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

Home > From unwanted bottles to useful bricks


From unwanted bottles to useful bricks

Sunday, 18 August, 2013, 12:00am

News›Hong Kong

ENVIRONMENT

Olivia Rosenman olivia.rosenman@scmp.com

When bottles arrive at Tiostone Environmental in Tuen Mun, they are crushed into glass sand which is mixed with fly ash from power plants and some other construction waste products to form bricks.

https://www.scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/486w/public/2013/08/18/n5.gif?itok=sqXnf7J1

“There’s no heat or fire involved in the whole process,” says Dixon Chan, Tiostone’s director.

Some companies, including Coca-Cola and Kowloon Dairy, reuse their glass bottles several times before sending them to Tiostone for recycling.

Tiostone, which began operating in 2005, produces between 10,000 and 15,000 square metres of bricks a year, which are mostly used for paving. At present, the company’s biggest buyers are government contractors.

Tiostone ecobricks have been put to use in redeveloping Kai Tak, and are often used to pave emergency vehicle access roads.

“They can sustain the load of a fire truck,” he says.

As with most green products, ecobricks are more expensive than their non-recycled counterparts, especially those from the mainland.

“You have to compare apples to apples,” says Chan. “We are not on the same page as the Chinese bricks. They are low-strength, do not meet the standard and have very bad colour.”

Chan says Tiostone has the capacity to process more waste glass, but finding a market willing to pay for the product has proved difficult. He is urging the government to adopt a green procurement programme to ensure all new government developments use ecobricks and other green building materials.

Another challenge the company faces is high premiums for workers’ insurance. It’s a common issue in the recycling industry, as new technologies and processes make insurers wary.

“It’s a very big disadvantage to all recycling businesses in Hong Kong,” says Chan.


www.laputa-eco.com/FlowChart.html

http://www.laputa-eco.com/Profile.html

www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6775608n

www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Fly_ash

Even the EPA has promoted the reuse of coal ash in manufacturing, but an inspector general’s report issued earlier this year found that in allowing the reuse of coal ash, the agency had not sufficiently assessed the environmental risk of a material which, in its second life as a wallboard or a road surface, still contains the original toxic compounds. (Care to re-do the baby’s room with sheet rock that contains dioxins, lead, mercury and cadmium?)

Office of Inspector General Investigates EPA’s ‘Partnership’ with Coal Industry

On November 2, 2009 the EPA Office of Inspector General (OIG) announced in a report that a formal investigation into the EPA’s “partnership” with the coal industry to market coal ash reuse in consumer, agricultural and industrial products was underway. The report also criticized the EPA for not releasing a report about cancer risks associated to the exposure of coal ash until March of 2009, a full seven years after the study was completed. The OIG investigation is a result of CBS’s “60 Minutes” piece on coal ash in which EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson admitted that her agency had not produced any studies indicating that the re-use of coal ash was safe

Recent USEPA reports indicate that coal waste leaches hazardous pollution in much greater quantities than had been recognized previously, contributing to over 100 documented contamination sites nationwide, several of which are in Illinois.

Groups sue EPA for coal ash regulation www.publicintegrity.org/2012/04/06/8612/impact-environmental-groups-sue-epa-over-lack-coal-ash-regulation

In April 2012, eleven environmental organizations filed suit against the EPA to force it to better regulate toxic coal ash, citing recent groundwater contamination at 29 coal ash dump sites in 16 states, according to EPA data. Earthjustice, which filed the lawsuit, said the EPA has not updated coal ash disposal and control regulations in more than 30 years, and continues to delay new rules despite recent evidence of “leaking waste ponds, poisoned groundwater supplies and threats to public health.”

On March 23, 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general released a report stating that the federal government had promoted some uses of coal ash, including wallboard or filler in road embankments, without properly testing the environmental risks. The report said wallboard “may represent a large universe of inappropriate disposal applications with unknown potential for adverse environmental and human health impacts.”

Evaluation of municipal waste incinerator fly ash toxicity and the role of cadmium by two aquatic toxicity tests Abstract http://news.newclear.server279.com/?p=3181

“Fly ash from a municipal solid waste incinerator in Japan is regulated under the hazardous waste regulation “Waste under Special Control” according to the Amendment of the Waste Disposal and Public Cleansing Law, because it contains high concentrations of heavy metals which are available for leaching. To evaluate the toxicity of fly ash, a fly ash leachate was prepared according to the Japanese standard leaching procedure. The chemical analysis of the leachate showed that possibly one of the most toxic substances was cadmium. The toxicity of the leachate and the cadmium was determined by algal assay and a Daphnia acute toxicity test. The results showed that the leachate was about seven times more toxic to the growth of algae and 20 to 30 times more toxic to the survival of Daphnia than expected from its cadmium concentration”

‘March of the incinerators’ threatens drive to recycle more rubbish

Aug 18th, 2013
by Editor.
No comments yet

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/18/march-of-the-incinerators-recycling

‘March of the incinerators’ threatens drive to recycle more rubbish

Rise in number of plants burning waste may be disincentive to greener methods of disposal

Workers sort recycling at Greenstar Recycling

Workers sort recycling at Greenstar Recycling facility at Aldridge near Walsall. Building more incinerators could be a disincentive to such efforts. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian

A rush to build incinerators to burn waste and break the UK’s reliance on landfill is threatening the country’s commitment to increase its recycling rates.

As new figures reveal that recycling rates have fallen for the first time in 30 years, experts warn that the UK is in danger of building far more incineration capacity than it needs. The controversial waste disposal systems are used to produce electricity and heat for homes and industry. But there are fears that the “march of the incinerators”, as some have called it, will act as a disincentive for councils to recycle waste.

Historically, the UK has used landfill as its preferred method for waste disposal and, as a result, has been slower to adopt incineration than other EU states. However, an obligation to meet EU directives has meant that in recent years the UK has been forced to find alternative means of disposal. The directives are yielding results. Just under 47 million tonnes of waste was sent to landfill last year, compared with just over 84 million tonnes in 2001.

This has given a significant fillip to the incineration industry both in the UK and abroad. Much of the UK’s waste that ends up being incinerated currently goes to Germany or the Netherlands, where it is burned and used to heat homes. The process is often cheaper than seeking landfill sites in the UK.

Experts said the use of incinerators had consequences for recycling as local authorities were forced to divert waste to feed the plants. “The choice to invest in thermal treatment can hold back recycling efforts,” Adam Baddeley, principal consultant at Eunomia, said. “At one level, the money invested in such plant simply isn’t available to put into building recycling plants or collection infrastructure. And once you’ve built an incinerator or gasifier, there’s a strong incentive to keep it fed with waste, even if that means keeping on collecting as ‘black bag’ rubbish, material that would be economically practicable to collect separately for recycling.”

Charmian Larke, technical adviser for Cornwall Waste Forum, which unsuccessfully opposed a large incinerator in the south-west, questioned the planning process that resulted in incinerators being approved. “Some of them [planning officers] have spent their entire careers trying to get this incinerator so they are wedded to the idea,” Larke said. “But if the council members understood how bad these contracts were, the officers would lose their jobs.”

Larke claimed that many of the incinerators were built in poorer areas. “There’s a feeling that people who are downtrodden have a harder time getting their act together to object, and hence it’s easier to place nasty things next to them.”

Julian Kirby, waste resources campaigner at Friends of the Earth, described incinerators as a 19th-century technology used to treat a 20th-century problem. “The growing success of recycling and food waste collections – and the potential to redesign products to cut waste and boost reuse and recycling even more – mean there are few things more pointlessly parasitic on cash-strapped councils than incinerators,” Kirby said.

There are now 39 incineration plants in the UK that have either been built are under construction or are at the planning stage, and there are concerns about overcapacity.

“The UK needs sufficient infrastructure to treat our residual waste and divert it from landfill,” said Baddeley. “However, with a recycling target of 50% by 2020 and a decline in waste arising, if the large number of planned [incineration] facilities become operational, there is a real risk of us building excess thermal treatment capacity, something we already see in various northern European countries. They over-invested in treatment facilities and are now importing a growing amount of waste, particularly from the UK and Ireland, to fill them.”

A spokeswoman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said sending waste to landfill or incineration should be the last resort. “We have been clear with local authorities that incineration must not compete with recycling or ways of reducing the amount of waste we produce.”