Every year Hong Kong produces more and more harmful electronic waste, but we only have a voluntary e-waste recycling scheme. This is a big problem, explains June Ng.

Hong Kongers are hooked on gadgets. Friends of the Earth (FoE) recently surveyed 1,139 students from Primary Four to Form Three and found that more than 50 percent had bought a game console in the past three years, and that each of them owned an average of three game consoles at a time. Less then 10 percent donated the old ones to charities, and only 2.5 percent put them in proper recycling facilities. An FoE spokesperson pointed out that despite their small size, these consoles are equivalent to small computers, and release toxin-like dioxin if not disposed of properly. They may also be one of the fastest growing sources for electronic waste, also known as “e-waste.”
E-waste falls into three different categories. The first is computer appliances, which includes not only the bodies and monitors of standard computers but also products such as scanners, printers, cell phones and digital cameras. The second is electronic appliances, which includes washing machines, fridges and televisions. Ninety-nine TVs were found abandoned on a roadside in Yuen Long at the beginning of the year, a mess that the government took almost a month getting the responsible authorities to clean up. The third category of e-waste, and the most ignored, includes energy saving fluorescent lights and rechargeable batteries.

As Asia’s self-proclaimed “World City,” we’ve been talking about recycling for years, but as always the figures are disappointing. First of all, the amount of electronic waste we’ve been generating has been steadily increasing. There were 67,000 tons of e-waste in 2005, which increased to 71,000 tons in 2008. Approximately 1.5 million computers and electronic appliances are thrown away a year, but only 1,300 have been recycled through the Environmental Protection Department (EPD). About 85 percent are shipped to third world countries and the rest go to local landfills.

In 2005, the government did put forward a “Policy Framework for the Management of Municipal Solid Waste,” which included targets on e-waste to be reached by 2014. Yet e-waste ended up absent from the official bill submitted to the Legislative Council the following year.
This is particularly disappointing considering that even China decided to implement its own version of the European Union’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (the fun-sounding “WEEE Directive”) in March, which requires countries to make manufacturers of electrical and electronic equipment responsible for their disposal. This fact makes the Environmental Affairs Manager for FoE, Hahn Chu, question the local government’s sincerity when formulating environmental policy. “They take economic development as the first priority, and it ends up doing a lot of harm to our reputation,” he says.

Thus with the producer responsibility bill on electronic products still out of sight, we’re left to rely largely on voluntary recycling. To its credit, the EPD does have a “Mobile WEEE Collection Centre,” which collects waste electrical and electronic equipment on the weekends at different locations. But the program has been running for a year and has only collected 1,400 used computers and 2,700 used electronic appliances. The authority says they just wanted to provide an alternative recycling channel and that its purpose is mainly educational, with no specific targets set for it.

The EPD also works with the Hong Kong WEEE Recycling Association to collect and recycle old computers and related appliances. The program started over a year ago and set an annual target of 50,000 pieces of waste, but so far only 25,000 have been collected. Jacky Cheung, chairman of the association, puts this down to most owners getting rid of their electronic products through second-hand collection points.

Former Legislator Choy So-yuk, who has devoted herself to environmental issues for years, puts it down to the fact that we can just dispose such waste almost anywhere on the street for free. “If you can dump this for free on the street, why would you bother to carry your unwanted appliances to a more inconvenient place?” she continues. “Moreover, nobody knows where the designated spots are in the first place.”

The EPD says it will have a consultation on the producer responsibility bill for electronic products at the end of this year. Let’s hope it’s not just another disposable promise.

Go to www.wastereduction.gov.hk for extensive information about collection points for e-waste in different districts.