Down a dead聽end road in the New Territories area of Kong Nga Po, a stone鈥檚 throw from pig pens, fish ponds and an organic farm, a pile of still-smoking ash spills from a Maersk container.
A worker operating a crane is ripping open bags of cooled ash. Some ash falls into the bed of a truck, the rest into the vegetation along the road. The smell of burnt plastic is overpowering. Asked what has been burned, the worker responds: 鈥淚t is from those things over there.鈥� He points to blocks of baled plastic from old televisions, printers, computers and other electronic waste.
Most of that waste has ended up in Hong Kong from abroad. The site is one of hundreds across the New Territories where waste is processed, mostly on land zoned for agriculture. The workshops dismantle, separate and sort metals and plastics which are sold to traders who ship them elsewhere for further processing.
Sites that burn e-waste are an anomaly in Hong Kong, though a concerning one that 鈥� according to those who monitor the global trade in scrap electronics 鈥� demonstrates the need to implement controls on a sector that has until now been largely unregulated.
Shown photos of the site, Jim Puckett, Executive Director of Basel Action Network (BAN), which put the trackers in the e-waste from the United States that led investigators to the location, said he had 鈥渘ever seen anything like it鈥� in Hong Kong.
In recent years, after mainland China shut its borders to most imported e-waste and closed most informal processing operations in Guangdong, many of those trackers have ended up in Hong Kong. Of the first 65 that left the US, 37 made it here; since September, 10 more have arrived. Notified about the discovery of what appeared to be remnants of highly toxic printed circuit boards incinerated to extract valuable metals, Hong Kong鈥檚 Environmental Protection Department [EPD] conducted inspections on August 15 and is now testing the ash to determine its origin.
Much of the e-waste being recycled in Hong Kong comes from abroad, and while the exact figure is not known, Shirley Kwok, managing director of Wing Fat Recycling Metals and an adviser for the Hong Kong Recycling Chamber of Commerce, estimates upwards of 40 per cent of all containers coming into the city carry scrap of some kind, though not all of it e-waste.
In addition to the imported e-waste, the city produces upwards of 70,000 tons of its own. And around 80 per cent of that ends up being exported elsewhere, some of it destined for places like Africa and Southeast Asia where it is often broken down by unregulated, informal recyclers.
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