The Green Manager Scheme (GMS) was set up in January 1994 to oversee green housekeeping measures in individual government offices. All government bureaux and departments have appointed Green Managers and Green Executives to oversee green practices (such as minimising waste) and promote the principle of Reduce, Re-use and Recycle (3Rs). To ensure continual improvement, they also regularly monitor the performance of green initiatives and report to the heads of their bureaux or departments, who are required to prepare annual Controlling Officer's Environmental Reports (COERs). The GMS has initially concentrated on green housekeeping measures, and is being extended to cover environmental auditing and the operation of an Environmental Management System (EMS).

Progress on the Green Manager Scheme

Since 2000, all bureaux and departments have launched waste minimisation measures, such as reducing paper consumption and increasing the use of electronic communication and business transactions. Encouragingly, many public sector organisations have committed themselves to setting up EMS to demonstrate commitment and accountability on their corporate environmental performance. By the end of 2005, ten government departments (see notes a and b) have been certified to the ISO 14001 standard. The Environmental Protection Department (EPD) has maintained a central depository of all ISO 14001 certified organisations in Hong Kong. The depository is updated quarterly and published on the EPD web site (http://www.epd.gov.hk/epd/english/how_help/tools_ems/iso14001.html).

Seminar on Paper Saving and Other Green Office Initiatives

Further to the Green Manager Scheme and as part of the Government's drive to save paper, the Environment, Transport and Works Bureau (ETWB) announced on 31 March 2003 that bureaux and departments should, on a voluntary basis, aim to cut down their photocopying paper consumption by 2.5%, 5%, 7.5% and 10% respectively in 2003/04, 04/05, 05/06 and 06/07. To assist bureaux and departments to achieve the above voluntary targets, the ETWB and EPD jointly organised a seminar on 10 December 2003 to share views and experiences with some 170 government officials from about 70 bureaux and departments on practical paper saving measures, as well as other useful green office initiatives such as green procurement and waste reduction. The majority of the feedback from participants rated the seminar as good and useful.

Controlling Officer's Environmental Report (COER)

Since 2000, all heads of bureaux and departments have been publishing annual reports (COERs) on their environmental policies, measures, targets and implementation. The aim of COERs is to promote environmentally responsible operations and management and government-owned public corporations will also be encouraged to produce COERs. As a logical next step, the EPD carried out a benchmark survey of 160 COERs published in 1999 and 2000 to identify best practices on environmental reporting and areas for further improvement. A guidebook, "A Benchmark for Environmental Performance Reports" was published in December 2002, and disseminated to 120 government officials from about 80 bureaux and departments at a seminar workshop in January 2003 to help them improve the quality of their future Environmental Performance Reports. About 60% of the participants provided feedback on the seminar workshop. The majority of respondents ranked the seminar workshop as good and found it useful as a forum for stimulating thoughts and facilitating the sharing of ideas and experience on the subject.

A benchmarking guidebook has been produced for environmental performance reports

To further support the Environmental Performance Reports (EPR) initiative, all reporting guidebooks, benchmark tools and past reporting experience were consolidated into a useful web-based "Cyber Helpdesk on Environmental Performance Report" since August 2004 to provide readily accessible, concise guidance and information for reporters. So far, the HKSAR Government has produced more than 400 environmental performance reports. To facilitate information sharing of the environmental performance of all bureaux and departments, the EPD has maintained a central depository of all these reports on our web site with suitable hyperlink (http://www.epd.gov.hk/epd/ english/how_help/tools_epr/collect_1.html) as far as possible.

A web based help service for EPR reporters "Cyber Helpdesk on Environmental Performance Report"