This tour actually happened before the election, but I suppose you could say the onrush of history overtook the landfill in my mind! Anyway, I still want to write about this unusual experience.
The Hong Kong Chapter of the League of Women Voters of the United States is a unique group. Not only is it one of the very few League chapters outside the US (it used to be the only one, but now I think there are a few others), it really focuses on both making sure that US expats know how to cast their ballot while living overseas, but also tries to educate its members on the government and political activity in Hong Kong. There are many places and venues in Hong Kong for learning about Chinese culture, but it’s more difficult to discover the intricacies of the government and the different governmental agencies that make life here function. So far this year we have toured Legco (the Legislative Council that governs Hong Kong), and gone on a tour of one of the landfills. Actually this morning I went to a League talk on food safety, so we seem to be covering all angles of consumption!
Anyway, back to the landfill tour. We went way out into the New Territories to tour one of the landfills. This landfill did not look anything like what I expected a landfill to be. It was clean, tidy, efficiently run, well-planned and COVERED! It was also unimaginably huge, which if you consider the population of Hong Kong is to be expected, but it was still mind-blowing. There are three or four other landfills for Hong Kong up in the New Territories and this was the smallest one.
The reason the landfill is covered is that they make synthetic natural gas there. The trash is taken to a section of the landfill, where it is crushed and spread out on a bed of gravel, glass, rock and dirt and then covered with more dirt. When a section is filled it is covered with green plastic held down with old tires and rope. Into the plastic are sent pipes that remove the gas and send it to the machines that turn it into synthetic natural gas, which is sold to Town Gas, the natural gas distributor for Hong Kong.
We learned a lot about recycling in Hong Kong on this tour. It’s different than in the US, because there is a very active middleman enterprise of recycling collection. Even if you don’t put your recyclables into recycling containers, some little old man or woman is going to retrieve that item and sell it to the recycling companies. Any paper, plastic, tin or aluminum cans are going to be recycled. There is no market for recycling glass in Hong Kong, but it still gets used as part of the base for the landfills.
When we asked why there weren’t more recycling collection centers in Hong Kong our tour guide patiently explained that that would put people out of work. It’s just a different way of thinking about the process than in the US. I actually found that pretty reassuring. My helper was very eager to take my recycling down to the recycling bins in our apartment for me, and now I’m wondering if she really wanted them for herself so that she could resell them. I hope so; she needs all the extra money she can get.
Another thing we learned is the sort of thing that seems to happen so much in China and Hong Kong. The trash from Hong Kong Island is supposed to go to the landfills in the New Territories via boat. To that end there are collection centers on the Island. But it costs money to take trash to the collection centers. So instead, the private trash collectors drive their trash directly to the landfills, wasting fuel and damaging the roads. So why doesn’t the government remove the fee at the collection centers? Good question…with the same answer as so many other questions here – that’s China!
For some interesting pictures of the landfill go check out my webpage in Flickr.
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