October 31, 2008 Touring a Landfill
The Swire SITA Waste Services location is north of Fanling. The group met with Mr. Mike Campbell, General Manager of the company given a briefing and tour of the NENT Landfill. The following is an excerpt put together by member Lynn Nill.
The Hong Kong Chapter of the League of Women Voters of the United States is a unique group. Not only is it one of the very few League chapters outside the US, it really focuses on both making sure that US expats know how to cast their ballot while living overseas, but also tries to educate its members on the government and political activity in Hong Kong. There are many places and venues in Hong Kong for learning about Chinese culture, but it’s more difficult to discover the intricacies of the government and the different governmental agencies that make life here function.
We went way out into the New Territories to tour one of the landfills. The North East New Territories (NENT) landfill did not look anything like what we expected a landfill to be. It was clean, tidy, efficiently run, well-planned and COVERED! It was also unimaginably huge, which if you consider the population of Hong Kong, is to be expected. There are three landfills for Hong Kong in the New Territories and this was the smallest one. The three landfills are located in Nim Wan, Tseung Kwan O and Ta Kwu Ling. Liners, leachate collection and treatment systems, landfill gas management systems, and surface and ground water management systems are in place to control air and water impacts. To view more information on the landfill you can visit: http://www.epd.gov.hk/epd/english/environmentinhk/waste/prob_solutions/msw_nent.html
The reason the landfill is covered is that they make synthetic natural gas there. The trash is taken to a section of the landfill, where it is crushed and spread out on a bed of gravel, glass, rock and dirt and then covered with more dirt. When a section is filled it is covered with green plastic held down with old tires and rope. Into the plastic are sent pipes that remove the gas and send it to the machines that turn it into synthetic natural gas, which is sold to Town Gas, the natural gas distributor for Hong Kong.
We learned a lot about recycling in Hong Kong on this tour. It’s different than in the US, because there is a very active middleman enterprise of recycling collection. Even if you don’t put your recyclables into recycling containers, some little old man or woman is going to retrieve that item and sell it to the recycling companies. Any paper, plastic, tin or aluminum cans are going to be recycled. There is no market for recycling glass in Hong Kong, but it still gets used as part of the base for the landfills.
When we asked why there weren’t more recycling collection centers in Hong Kong our tour guide patiently explained that that would put people out of work. It’s just a different way of thinking about the process than in the US. We actually found that pretty reassuring.
Something else we learned is the sort of thing that seems to happen so much in China and Hong Kong. The trash from Hong Kong Island is supposed to go to the landfills in the New Territories via boat from collection centers on the Island. But it costs money to take trash to the collection centers. So instead, the private trash collectors drive their trash directly to the landfills, wasting fuel and damaging the roads. So why doesn’t the government remove the fee at the collection centers? Good question…with the same answer as so many other questions here – that’s China!
