Why recycling isn’t working in Hong Kong: battery recovery plant is idle most of the time – is apathy or smuggling to blame?
- The brainchild of actress Sharon Kwok, her tycoon husband and friends, battery recycling centre is grossly underused, like its Hong Kong Eco-Park neighbours
- Lead-acid batteries used in vehicles can be 95 per cent recycled, but the plant doesn’t receive enough of them. It may be another victim of recycling apathy
Hong Kong’s Battery Recycling Centre has been ominously quiet for some time. On a recent visit the mainly bright blue machinery and yellow safety fencing were still spick and span.
It’s not supposed to be like this. Instead, the box-shaped, three-storey structure in Hong Kong’s EcoPark should be busy and noisy, smashing used lead-acid batteries to bits, cleaning and purifying their components and producing recycled products, especially lead.
The plant’s interior is reminiscent of the first Terminator movie – with conveyor belts, steel gantries and stairways, machinery including outsize generators, and piping connecting enclosed tanks and vats.
The Battery Recycling Centre is the brainchild of Stanley Pong Kit, who is ranked by Gafencu luxury magazine as one of “the 300 Most Powerful People in Hong Kong”. In person, Pong is down-to-earth and fond of recalling his student days in a band whose lead singer went on to form the Eurovision Song Contest-winning British pop group Brotherhood of Man.
The plant was first set up partly because Pong had extensive metallurgy experience working with Shiu Wing Steel, which was established by his father, Pong Ding-yuen, and partly because he is married to actress-turned-conservationist Sharon Kwok Sau-wan. While profits from the recycling plant would be a bonus, it is chiefly a social venture, aimed at solving a serious issue that few environmentalists are even aware of.
“When most people think of batteries and recycling, they think of the small AAs and AAAs,” says Pong. “But about 95 per cent of batteries by weight are lead-acid batteries. They’re mainly used in transport – providing sparks for ignition in internal combustion engines, even as backup batteries in electric vehicles.”
