Monitoring standards for Hong Kong’s drinking water to go beyond WHO levels, officials say
Move comes two years after tainted water scare, and will involve strengthened legislation on plumbing as well as sampling programme
Hong Kong has launched a comprehensive safety overhaul of its drinking water and is seeking to adopt standards beyond guidelines set by the World Health Organisation after learning a bitter lesson from a lead contamination scandal in 2015.
A citywide action plan announced on Thursday will involve enhanced monitoring through a new approach to tap water sampling, testing for heavy metals, using collected data to adopt better standards, and stronger regulatory control of plumbing materials and contractors.
The Water Supplies Department said it would draw about 670 samples from taps across Hong Kong annually to test for six metals – lead, nickel, chromium, cadmium, copper and antimony. Participation is voluntary.
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Private and public housing flats, as well as businesses, would be covered and results would be published weekly on its official website, the department said.
But it rejected calls to carry out tests at all public housing estates built after 2005, claiming that random sampling would be representative enough. About a third of the samples are expected to come from public housing estates, reflecting the current ratio of public to private flats.
The new two-tier sampling system will include a “random day time test” of one-litre samples straight from the taps, subject to further verification tests if metals are found to exceed acceptable levels.
This requires letting taps run for five minutes and then leaving the water to stagnate in pipes for 30 minutes before further one-litre samples are drawn.
