Thomas Tang

Opinion | Hong Kong needs more than an incinerator to achieve its zero waste goal

Lessons from cities such as Tokyo and Taipei can help Hong Kong adopt a holistic approach to waste management

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On June 19, a worker moves equipment at the construction site of I·PARK1, Hong Kong’s first waste-to-energy facility for treating municipal solid waste. Getting the hardware ready is the easy part. The more difficult challenge is to get households to sort waste properly for combustion and recycling. Photo: Sam Tsang

Thomas Tang

Published: 9:30am, 27 Jun 2024

In 1997, Hong Kong’s last operating public incinerator at Kwai Chung was shut down. The incinerator had reached the end of its useful life. The goal of Hong Kong’s waste reduction plan then became finding alternative means of municipal solid waste disposal. It has taken decades to come up with the I·PARK1 incinerator, which is due to open in Shek Kwu Chau in 2025.

There are probably a number of reasons behind the government’s procrastination, ranging from Nimbyism to concerns over costs – although the result of putting off the decision has been costly, with the cost of I.PARK1 ballooning to HK$31.3 billion (US$4 billion).

The good news is that, although it is a little behind other modern cities, Hong Kong has finally realised that burying solid waste in the ground is not the panacea for waste disposal. That said, a few points must be addressed before we start applauding the government’s actions.

An incinerator is not a waste disposer. Incineration serves to reduce mass and volume. There is still the problem of the non-combustible waste residue, which is almost 10 per cent of the original volume. This is where a landfill is useful – to bury the output from the incineration process, inert bottom ash.

If we had built an incinerator 10 years ago, Hong Kong might have extended the lives of our three strategic landfill sites by at least 10 years. In other places, bottom ash is used as filler for construction materials. In Singapore, which has at least four incinerators, it may soon be used for marine reclamation.

The waste processing capacity of I·PARK1 is 3,000 tonnes of waste per day. When I·PARK 2 comes on line, Hong Kong’s capacity could increase to 9,000 tonnes per day. According to the Environmental Protection Department’s data on waste, we produce 15,725 tonnes per day, so we are still short of dealing with all of Hong Kong’s solid municipal waste.