環境保護與廢物管理：由渠道到徵費

1. Drains before environment: separation and screening

In the early colonial years Hong Kong used a combined system in which stormwater and sewage shared one pipe: rain flushed the waste away, and untreated effluent flowed into Victoria Harbour. That design could just about work when the population was small and rainfall plentiful, but once buildings were dense and water use rose, the pipes carried rain and sewage at the same time, and backflow and smell followed.

In 1902 Hong Kong introduced a separate stormwater and sewage channel system, dividing the two discharges. It looks like an engineering detail, but it turned “the environment” into something that could be planned: rainwater had its own route, sewage had its own route, and only then could treatment be discussed.

After the war the population grew quickly and waste and sewage rose together. In September 1955 the landfill at Gin Drinkers Bay in Kwai Chung opened, taking most refuse from the urban areas of Hong Kong and Kowloon; in 1956 Hong Kong’s first sewage screening plant was built and put into operation at Anchor Street, Tai Kok Tsui. Screening only removed large solids and was not real treatment, but it marked a change: the government had begun to accept that sewage had to pass through a facility before reaching the sea.

2. Black smoke, Lap Sap Chung and the birth of an agency

On 22 May 1959 the Government laid down control measures for polluting emissions from the burning of industrial fuel and issued an ordinance for that purpose. The target was black smoke — pollution that could be seen. Visible pollution was regulated before the colourless and odourless kind.

Pollution control was not at first the business of a single department. In February 1971 a Pollution Control Unit under the Marine Department was established, handling oil pollution, enforcing the law and coordinating with other departments to clear marine litter. Oil at sea and smoke on land sat in two different systems, which shows how regulation was divided by where the pollution occurred.

On 16 August 1972 the Hong Kong Clean-up Campaign Committee held a publicity launch at Hong Kong City Hall, with a cartoon character, Lap Sap Chung, played by a real person as its mascot. The campaign turned litter from a municipal matter into a city-wide publicity subject and was the starting point of later Keep Hong Kong Clean drives.

In January 1981 the Environmental Protection Department was set up, taking over the former work of the Environmental Protection Group. Only after the department existed were monitoring, impact assessment and standard-setting gathered in one place; before that, air, water, noise and waste were handled separately by different departments.

3. From monitoring to assessment: measure before deciding

Once the department existed, the first task was to have numbers. In 1983 the Environmental Protection Department began using a pilot environmental impact assessment process. What matters about assessment is not the thickness of the report but the order: impacts are estimated before construction, not remedied after completion.

On 18 October 1983 a Karenia mikimotoi red tide was recorded at Tolo Harbour in Tai Po, and a toxin level of 1200 mu per kilogram was detected in fish tissue — the first toxic red tide found in Hong Kong. Monitoring, the episode shows, is not paperwork: samples must be taken, tested and reported before the public can know what is happening in the water.

Put assessment and the red tide together and the character of this stage appears: the government began to talk about the environment in data rather than only describing it as dirty. That shift also gave later disputes a common language, since both supporters and opponents had to cite monitoring results.

4. The 1989 white paper: turning pollution into a ten-year plan

The 1989 white paper set out a contrast: between 1974 and 1989 the population rose by 30 per cent, while GDP and the volume of waste each increased by 300 per cent. Placed side by side, the three figures say something plain — waste growth was not a natural consequence of population growth but was amplified along with economic activity.

On 5 June 1989 the Government published a white paper on fighting pollution, setting out the Strategic Sewage Disposal Scheme and a polluter pays policy for the following ten years. Those two ideas then shaped Hong Kong’s environmental policy for decades: sewage would be treated and discharged centrally, and those who generated pollution would pay.

The white paper was also a self-examination. It attributed poor environmental quality to the government’s earlier lack of attention to environmental matters and wrote departmental reorganisation into its recommendations. The post-1989 environmental structure — including the later Planning, Environment and Lands Branch, the Planning Department and the Drainage Services Department — began with this document.

5. Waste: from voluntary habits to a charge

The first step in waste policy relied on volunteers. From 1993 the Environmental Protection Department promoted a Bring Your Own Bag campaign, encouraging people to carry their own bags; it cost little, but its effect depended on habit and carried no obligation.

In 2005 the strategy covered a set of actions: promoting recycling arrangements, establishing a producer responsibility system, exploring charges for municipal solid waste, building an EcoPark, applying green procurement and banning disposal at landfills. On 15 December 2005 the department published a policy outline setting a ten-year overall strategy for municipal solid waste management. The point of a policy document is to place recycling and charging on the same road map.

On 7 July 2009 the environmental levy scheme on plastic shopping bags came into force, the first producer responsibility scheme. From 1 April 2015 the levy was extended across the retail sector, charging customers at least 50 cents per bag. Between a voluntary bring-your-own-bag habit and a charge on every bag lies a judgement: voluntarism was not enough, and price had to change behaviour.

Charging for municipal solid waste moved more slowly. On 20 March 2017 the Secretary for the Environment announced a proposal with two modes, by household by bag and by weight. The difference is not only technical: the bag mode sits close to households, while the weight mode addresses commerce and industry.

6. What remains unfinished

This dossier deliberately does not say that municipal solid waste charging has been implemented. The chronicle reaches only the announcement of 20 March 2017; the later legislation and commencement dates do not appear in the registered entries, and writing “implemented” here would replace the source with an impression.

Three other groups of figures are left blank: the throughput and cost of waste-to-energy and incineration facilities; the classification used for waste volumes in different periods, since household, commercial and industrial, and construction waste cannot simply be added together; and the phased cost and outfall locations of the Strategic Sewage Disposal Scheme. All three require year-by-year official documents that this site has not verified page by page.

Air follows the same rule. The ordinance of 1959 addressed black smoke, but later reviews of air quality objectives, roadside monitoring and regional pollution appear only sporadically in the chronicle, so this dossier does not present cleaner air as a completed result.