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Following is the transcript of remarks by the Secretary for the Environment, Mr Wong Kam-sing, on the cleaning up of coastal areas this afternoon (October 26):
Secretary for the Environment: The meeting was a good one attended by 20 organisations with about 40 people from different backgrounds. They shared what they had done about the plastic pellet collection. We all look forward to having better co-operation in future probably through two aspects. One is public private sector partnership and the second is to strengthen inter-departmental co-operation. Today we launched two initiatives, one is ˇ§Adopt a Beachˇ¨ to be pioneered by the World Wide Fund with funding support from the Government. The second one is to set up an inter-departmental committee headed by the Environment Bureau and supported by concerned government departments so that we can all have a more strategic, holistic way to clean our coastal areas and also support the private sector initiatives.
Reporter: (On co-operation with organisations in the future and the two measures that have been mentioned)
Secretary for the Environment: I think we talked about the cleaning of the coastal areas. On one hand we will consider the proposal put forward by the World Wide Fund. If appropriate, we will have the funding support for them so that we can launch the initiatives as soon as possible. Secondly, we have been setting up our inter-departmental committee and we have started the research on chasing the source of rubbish and pollution, so that when the committee is set up we can have more data to help them sharpen their strategies on cleaning the coastal areas.
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)
Ends/Friday, October 26, 2012
Issued at HKT 20:19
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