Environment Secretary offers few details on long-term waste plans

As environment officials struggle to force through the legislature plans for landfill expansion and a waste incinerator, the environment minister yesterday said it was time for the city to examine its waste infrastructure for the next three decades.

While any mention of long-term planning for waste infrastructure was absent from the policy address, Secretary for the Environment Wong Kam-sing revealed that the government was looking towards reducing the city's dependence on its rapidly filling landfills.

"[Planning] for the next 20 to 30 years, we will commission a study this year on where we can apply technologies … to minimise our dependence on landfills," Wong said at a press conference yesterday.

Wong did not elaborate on the scope of the study and what technologies he was referring to.

At present, the city's key waste infrastructure includes at least three landfills, a chemical waste treatment plant, an under-construction sludge incinerator, a network of eight refuse transfer stations and a recycling park.

While the sludge incinerator and recycling park were approved by lawmakers in 2009 and 2006 respectively, the rest of the facilities were proposed and developed in the 1990s.