Govt unveils $29.2b plan with 5.5-year timeline for waste-to-energy facility I·PARK2

The planned Integrated Waste Management Facilities Phase 2 (I·PARK2), with a design treatment capacity of 6,000 tonnes of municipal solid waste (MSW) per day, comes with an estimated construction cost of HK$29.2 billion.

According to the documents submitted to the Legislative Council by the Environment and Ecology Bureau, the government proposes upgrading the project to Grade A and targeting to commence the proposed works for functional completion by phases starting from around five and a half years upon funding approval.

To tie in with the construction timeline, parallel tendering has been undertaken to allow early commencement of the proposed works.

Located at the Middle Ash Lagoon at Tsang Tsui in Tuen Mun, the proposed I·PARK2 — together with I·PARK1 — are expected to treat 9,000 tonnes of MSW per day to generate electricity, turning waste into energy.

The government said the North East New Territories Landfill Extension will be able to cease receiving MSW completely by that time and transform to receive construction waste only.

“If the public and various sectors of society keep the momentum in waste reduction to further reduce the amount of MSW disposal to below 9,000 tonnes per day, there may not be a need to construct I·PARK3 for Hong Kong to achieve the goal of ‘zero landfill’ by 2035,” the document wrote.

The Bureau added that the proposed I·PARK2 project was preliminarily estimated at about HK$35.7 billion. To minimize the project cost as far as possible, the project has implemented various measures including optimizing contractual and design requirements, adopting mainstream technology to enhance tendering competitiveness, allowing the contractor to adopt the Modular Integrated Construction (MiC) method to enhance construction efficiency and cost-effectiveness and so on.