Time to throw out the old mindset on waste problem

Last week, the chief executive returned from Sweden, where he was on a trip to study how this small country, with a marginally higher population than Hong Kong, manages to be so innovative in its development and use of technology.

Separately, Secretary for the Environment Wong Kam-sing won a hard-fought battle this week to get his Shek Kwu Chau incineration plant project through the Legislative Council public works subcommittee.

These two stories brought back memories of my service in the now defunct Regional Council, under which, back in the late 1980s, we visited Sweden with the help of the Swedish consulate to see how waste was tackled.

We got to know what was then a very sophisticated system: a network of underground vacuum pipes to collect household rubbish. The waste was first sorted at homes and put into different-coloured bags. These were stored temporarily in inlet pipes that were then emptied at regular intervals by vacuum suction to nearby collecting stations, where the bags were sorted by colour and opened automatically.

The result was a highly efficient and hygienic rubbish sorting and recycling system that reduced significantly the amount of municipal waste that had to be disposed at landfills.

A quarter of a century later, Sweden now claims the amazing achievement that less than 1 per cent of the country's domestic rubbish ends up in a dump. The rest is recycled: half from waste to heat energy via incineration, and the other half through material and biological recycling.

Its next priority is to sort and treat biologically no less than 50 per cent of food waste from homes, restaurants, institutional kitchens and shops by 2018.