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Following is a transcript of the media session by the Secretary for the Environment, Transport and Works, Dr Sarah Liao, after a radio programme this morning (January 14):

Reporter: You're talking about the Recovery Park and some sort of levy. What kind of incentive and levy are you looking at?

Dr Liao: The levy part is related to producer responsibility. There are many kinds of products. We're using tyres as an example which are polluting and hard to recycle. As a responsible producer, they should bear some of the cost and this can be factored into their sale price and that will be called a levy. And the levy can either be used by the manufacturers themselves if they can put up a recycling or recovery organisation or plant to do it. Otherwise, the Government can do it on their behalf using that levy to subsidise the recyclers.

Reporter: And you're also talking about separating rubbish. How to ... separate rubbish up to 80 per cent?

Dr Liao: We have a programme called source separation in all the residential blocks. We have started with 13 residential estates and that's proved to be very successful. We're planning to push it to many more places like public housing estates and private housing estates so that we can have a better recovery rate with garbage well separated. And we can increase the source of recyclable materials to enable the recycle industry to be a sustaining business.

Reporter: What about air pollution? This time in the Policy Address there doesn't seem to be a lot of measures to tackle air pollution here.

Dr Liao: Of course there are measures there. There are two very important policies that have been established. One is the use of emission cap to control the pollutants that come out from the power plants. That can be done very quickly because the specified process is likely to come out. Secondly, it's the use of natural gas. That is an important policy because this of course will, to a certain extent, affect the cost of electricity depending on how easily we can get hold of more natural gas. With that in the policy, power companies will have to ensure a constant supply of natural gas and they will have to purchase and engage into the long term contract to ensure that would happen.

The co-operation with Guangdong is one of the key issues which I have been talking about. It's not a new policy but it is a reiterated policy.

(Please also refer to the Chinese portion.)

Ends/Thursday, January 14, 2005

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