WHAT A LOAD OF RUBBISH

I recently unearthed this article I wrote back in 1996 for my column, Soapbox, in Journal One. Sadly that magazine didn't survive but nothing's changed that much on the garbage front since then, in fact in many ways things have got worse. 

Has anyone noticed how we seem to be surrounded by rubbish these days? Is this an attempt to get into the Guinness Book of Records as the most filthy country or what? I recently overheard two tourists grumbling about the amount of garbage they’d seen during their holiday and I got the impression that they wouldn’t be spending anymore of their hard-earned foreign currency on future holidays to Malaysia.

Discarded plastic, Styrofoam boxes and empty drink cans litter the highways and byways the length and breadth of the country, so it’s not only the tourists who are affected.  It’s now even becoming quite common to see garbage being dropped from moving cars.  It would appear that these litter louts give no apparent thought to the environment or the safety of other road users.  Just imagine what mayhem could ensue from a carelessly discarded fast food paper napkin flying onto another car’s windscreen. Because they drop their rubbish at high speed there’s no opportunity to pick it up and hand it back to them with a sweet, “I think you dropped something” - a tactic I do use with messy pedestrians.  Another thing that bothers me is to see children playing in and around garbage - a classic scenario for sakit purut if ever I saw one.

I think a lot of people have become desensitized to the problem. Let’s face it, if you pass by garbage on your way to the bus stop everyday after a while you don’t see it anymore – it becomes a normal part of the environment. And, if there are no rubbish bins provided on the street, then dropping that ice cream wrapper on the pavement becomes second nature. 

I got very excited a couple of years ago when the recycling rhetoric was in full swing. I waited and waited for the recycling bins to arrive in my housing area and the mounds of bottles and cans grew and grew until they threatened to takeover my kitchen.  Four years later I was still waiting.

In the beginning there were a few recycling centres in PJ, but that’s not much help if, like me, you live on the other side of town and don’t have a car.  So, much as it aggrieved me to do it, I eventually threw my collection into the neighbourhood skip – there isn’t any house-to-house garbage collection in my part of Ampang Jaya either.  At least bottles and cans are too heavy for the chickens to scatter around the neighbourhood, which is more than can be said for a lot of other stuff that’s thrown into that receptacle!

I’m a great believer in compost so all my organic waste goes into making rich fertile humus for my poor old sandy soil.  Eliminating organic waste from my garbage bin has not only substantially reduced the bulk of my rubbish, but the plants love it too.  Unfortunately some of my neighbours don’t!  The main fear is that snakes (especially cobras) will incubate their eggs in the compost heap and their offspring will invade their homes. I can honestly say that I’ve never seen a sign of a snake of any kind in my compost heap; I should imagine that the heat inside the mound would render the eggs hard-boiled in a matter of hours.  

My immediate next-door neighbours obviously think I’m too lazy to walk to the skip with my rubbish, preferring to leave it in the garden.  What seems to have escaped their attention, as they follow my imagined slothful example and throw their garbage over the fence, is that my stuff’s all ORGANIC.  However, when it comes to plastics I must admit I’m stumped to know what to do. And what about all the other junk? The broken computer, the old TV, the dead toaster, old batteries…the list is endless; all non-biodegradable and some actually toxic.

Of course it would be easy to just blame the local authorities for not being more pro-active, but we create the garbage so we should start taking responsibility for it too. Apart from setting up individual or communal compost heaps and getting involved in gotong royongs we can also try and reduce the amount of garbage we accumulate by not buying over-packaged items and re-using supermarket shopping bags.  In fact we can have endless fun creating inventive ways to recycle trash.

German artist HA Schult is a one-man recycling centre. Since 1996 he's made thousands of people out of household waste.  His trash people have been installed all over the world; from the Pyramids at Giza to the top of the Great Wall of China.

I’m always surprised that recycling hasn’t taken-off in a big way. Apart from the friendly neighbourhood paper lama guys there’s nothing else happening (at least in my area) Rubbish is big business – glass, various metals, plastics, in fact a whole range of waste products can be reused in one form or another.  This trash is worth money. Money is literally been thrown down the drain!

 And speaking of drains, did you know that many of them act as highways for household detergents, cooking and motor oils, heavy metals and a whole range of household effluent?  This all adds up to some pretty exotic and lethal cocktails going into the rivers and sea.  The Sepang river is now a black, fetid, stinking ooze. Dead! Go check it out if you don’t believe me but be warned, you’ll need a gas mask!  Better still, next time you fly to Singapore book a window seat and take a look at the rivers discharging into the Straits of Melaka.  Yellow got, brown got and even black got, but clear? Tak ada lah! There’s so much tanah melayu being dumped into the Straits, courtesy of developers and loggers, that it wouldn’t surprise me if, in twenty-something years time, wanna be illegal Indonesian migrants will be able to sprint across the newly appearing mudflats that appear at low tide.

 If this isn’t enough to leave you gasping, go fill your lungs full of soot, smoke, wood dust and all the other noxious stuff that finds it’s way into the very air we breathe.  Even when the haze gets really bad, the diehard belchers are still on the road and open burning of garbage and the forests continues with gay abandon.  I can’t understand why some people only clean-up their act when threatened with prosecution. Do they have a different air supply than the rest of us? Unpleasant is the only way to describe the air in KL these days.  Last year the pollution got so bad I really started to panic.  I mean what can you do to escape bad air?  Breathing isn’t optional, you can’t really choose not to do it.  I was in Port Dickson for a party recently and was really looking forward to getting some fresh sea air into my over-burdened lungs.  However, just as I hit Lukut I saw three separate plumes of black smoke spewing into the atmosphere from three different locations in PD.  Things like this bring out the militancy in me.  I knew the companies responsible; in fact I drove past them on my way to my friend’s house so I vowed never to buy any of their products ever again. Power to the consumer!

The other way to deal with such flagrant polluters is to report them to the Department of the Environment.  They do take action but are so severely understaffed and under financed that they rely on you and me to be their eyes and ears to some extent. But most of all I hope that the greedy industrialists will realise there’s more to business than profit margins and start adopting a more responsible attitude towards the environment.  I mean it isn’t as if the technology isn’t available because it is, but it’s usually expensive.  Personally I’d be willing to pay a bit more for products if I knew they’d been manufactured in an environmentally friendly way and I guess a lot of other people would too.

The fact that a lot of big businesses are environmentally irresponsible is not only indicative of greed and poor enforcement of environmental laws, it’s also symptomatic of some of the rubbish that the people in power have in their heads.  A lot of people have some very peculiar notions about the environment, which need to be dealt with.  Some of these are due to genuine ignorance, but a lot is based on self-interested nonsense.  A classic example of the sort of thing I’m referring to is the following extract from an interview with Datuk Amar James Wong, which appeared in the Sunday Star on August 11^th 1996.  The President of the Sarawak National Party, former State Environment Minister and Mr. Rimbunan Hijau (large timber conglomerate) told the nation: “I have written a book on logging. Logging doesn’t kill trees, shifting cultivation does. You can quote from my book.

What a load of rubbish!

See what I mean? Same old same old. I can't believe how naive I was about the DOE though.  Since then I've decided that a more accurate translation of their acronym would be Destroyers of the Environment. Over the years I've reported various industries to the DOE for various environmental crimes but despite their claim that they give you feedback in 48 hours I've never heard a word from them, ever!  In fact,since I wrote What a Load of Rubbish, almost 15 years ago, the DOE have allowed some very environmentally dodgy projects to materialise. 

And what about the 3R campaign launched by the Housing and Local Government Ministry in the mid 90s that got me all excited in the first place?  Ziltch!  The only real efforts to reuse, reclaim and recycle have been coming from the private sector and they've been having a tough time getting any of the politicians, who make decisions about rubbish, to take their initiatives onboard.  Alam Flora got a huge concession to collect garbage because their tender was based on the 3R concept - it's certainly splashed all over their website - but apart from a few recycling centres in obscure places and pilot schemes in Putrid Jaya and University Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) their trucks still collect thousands of tons of unsorted waste a day and dump the lot on landfills.  Of course it's also possible they got the multi-gazillion contract for other reasons... Actually does anyone have a fix on how much they've been given so far? I spent a while trying to find out online but couldn't get a ball park figure.

 When I was in Sydney earlier this year I was mega impressed by their way of managing municipal waste.  Households have three bins: one for organics, one for reusables and one for other waste. The collection trucks use an automated arm to grab and empty the content of the bins into the appropriate section of the truck. Simple! So how come we don't have a system like this?  And why, when there's so much talk about renewable energy, is there still so little investment and commitment from the local authorities and the relevant ministries in Waste to Energy technology.  Come on you garbage guys wake up and smell the landfills!  It's the 21st century so get with it! 

Waste Seminar part 1

I attended a 2-day seminar last week entitled “Green Technologies on Waste Management: Current Knowledge and Practices”. It was organized by The Waste Management Association of Malaysia (WMAM) and held at the Seri Pacific Hotel next to PWTC. 

WMAM very kindly allowed me in for free accepting that bloggers are part of the media too these days.  So a big thank you to them for that. 

 Unfortunately I missed the opening address, and the keynote speech, arriving just in time for the first speaker of the day from UKM who talked about using artificial intelligence (AI) enhanced automation to separate recycled containers from the garbage instead of the so-called scavengers who currently do this odious and unhealthy job. 

 As he talked about his prototype it was obvious that it will be a long time before this type of innovation will be able to have a significant impact on solving the issue at hand namely: the use of green technology in waste management to eliminate the production of greenhouse gases and to produce renewable energy. This will make a significant contribution to Malaysia’s effort to reduce global warming, as well as improving the environment.

Courtesy of Prof. Hassan Basri

The next speaker from UITM spoke about applying green technology to treat pollutants such as pharmaceutical and personal care products, endocrine modulating chemicals, nano materials and biological metabolites that are now finding their way into our water as a result of continuous and excessive use of improper disposal.  His forte is developing bio-solvents to absorb heavy metals so they can be recovered from contaminated water. During the research they found considerable amounts of PAH in municipal sewage sludge.  Similar research has been going on in Germany and Japan and there’s no doubt that this work is all valuable in the long term but it was all so theoretical yet again. 

 By lunchtime I was feeling slightly depressed by the lack of dynamism in the topics so far, another case of the “same old, same old.” I’m sure some great things will emerge from this research in the future but again, and I can’t over-stress this, we need to take action now!  And while it was interesting to hear about these research projects, there wasn’t any mention of the people who are already using EM (effective microbes) and nano technology to clean-up effluent right now.  I would have thought that a seminar organized by practitioners for practitioners would have had a practical rather than a theoretical focus. But there was still the afternoon session to look forward to.

 The first speaker was from Alam Flora  and she managed to raise my temperature, even though the room was very cold.  Now as far as I know, one of the reasons that Alam Flora got the concession to collect garbage from Selangor, Kelantan Pahang, Terengganu and the Federal Territories of K.L. and Putra Jaya back in 1995 was because they were in line with the ministry’s 3R policy to reduce, reuse, recycle.  So what have they been doing since then? Not much if this speaker’s presentation was anything to go by. The first part concentrated on different types of green technology and their various applications but when it came to the contribution Alam Flora was making it would appear nothing much has changed since they took over the concession almost 15 years ago.   

Courtesy of Sarifah Yaccob

They have set up pilot recycling schemes in Putrajaya and on the UKM campus but apart from that a lot of the recycling that is taking place is being done by privately funded initiatives, not Alam Flora. She did, almost dismissively, mention that Recycle Energy are generating electricity from RDF (refuse derived fuel in Semenyih but it wasn’t clear that this was a private initiative.  And anyway why is she talking about treatment when her company is responsible for collection?  Why not tell us what innovations are taking place in that department. But it was when she talked about the school educational programmes that I began to warm up.

Courtesy of Sarifah Yaccob

Now here’s the thing. Why does Alam Flora need to do this when schools are already staffed by qualified teachers?  Surely it wouldn’t be too difficult for this type of environmental awareness to be built into the curriculum, would it?  This would free Alam Flora to do what we need them to do, namely: to provide us with the bags or containers to store our separated waste in, and to have a fleet of trucks that keep it separated on it’s way to the recycle centre.

 The thing that really inflamed me was this ideas that it’s the public’s fault that more recycling isn’t going on. At present only 5% of our waste is being recycled but whose fault is that?  This idea that we’re all too stupid to figure out how to recycle is incredibly insulting. I agree that there is a need for a public campaign to create more awareness about how we manage our waste but this isn’t Alam Flora’s role, is it? 

I thought they were garbage collectors.  And whilst the residents and other garbage producing inhabitants of Putrajaya are enjoying the illusion that all’s well on the garbage front, many of the rest of us don’t get our rubbish collected at all.  I have to drive mine 10 kms to the nearest town and deposit it in an open communal skip by the roadside. In fact, since I came to live in Malaysia in 1988 I’ve only ever lived in 2 places that did have garbage collection and I don’t think my experience is uncommon. 

 This theme, that it’s the public’s fault, was repeated several times throughout the seminar by many of the speakers and participants, I felt like screaming. How on earth can we ever hope to start trying to solve our environmental problems when the so-called experts can’t seem to get beyond covering their own rear ends for a job badly done.  What’s blatantly missing is commitment, not only from the public but from the waste concessionaires, and the government too. They know how much money has been ploughed into waste management and they can also see -when they step outside the rarified and sanitized zone of Putrajaya - that we haven’t made much progress in the last 20 years or so.  The very fact that they are still talking about landfills when waste to energy technology is already up and running is, in itself, a measure of their lack of sincerity.  So I’m left asking what’s going on? Why don’t people take pride in their work and decide to do a good job instead of a mediocre one?

 The Alam Flora presentation was followed by a paper on converting waste to bio-fuels by a speaker from UTM who has been doing research into extracting bio-gas from waste. He said biotechnology was a useful strategy to adopt when treating sewage and palm oil waste but not efficient for solid waste.

Oxidation pond at Frangipani Hotel, Langkawi

Organic corn growing in the hotel's vegetable garden.

I was cheered up a little by the presenter from a hotel in Langkawi that is taking care of its own dirty business by composting their organic waste and treating their own wastewater. I had seen this presentation at the national waste seminar I attended in September so decided to do my bit to reduce my carbon footprint by leaving before  the notorious KL jam. 

 

BLOTS ON THE LANDSCAPE

Rubbish from apartments on Jalan Ampang, Selangor.

One of the things that really gets me hopping mad is the amount of garbage littering the country. No matter where you go, there’s always rubbish lying around. When I lived in Ampang Jaya in the early 90s there was a stinking rubbish skip at the end of my road which rarely got emptied. I went back there recently to see how the area had changed and could hardly get my bearings. Many of the old houses have been replaced by apartment buildings, there’s even a school on the field where the local kids used to play. Pretty much everything is different, except for the garbage skip that hasn’t moved and it's still overflowing with foulness.

More rubbish at Jalan Ampang apartments, shame on you MPAJ!

When I moved to Kuala Kubu Bharu in the mid 90s, it was the same. Open skips in various locations around town attracting flies, dogs, cats and chickens that rummage through the skip spreading the evil stuff all over the side of the road.

In 2005 I moved to Puchong where the garbage was actually collected three times a week but the area was still littered with rubbish. One day I saw a lady throw a bag of garbage onto a green area right outside her own house. When I asked her why she didn’t put it in her bin she told me to mind my own business. Okay! But in my opinion, if she’s dumping her waste in a common area, it is my business.

Now I live in a small village whose stunning natural beauty attracts a lot of visitors, especially at weekends and public holidays. But the majority of these people leave more than their footprints behind. Styrofoam food boxes, plastic bottles and bags, discarded soft drink cans even used diapers are all left littering the village and the nearby river…and this river supplies KL with drinking water.

So now I’m on a personal mission to try and help clean up wherever I find myself in whatever way I can. Sometimes I pick up a piece of garbage that someone's just thrown down in the street and hand it back to them with an innocent, “Excuse me, I think you dropped this” Most people I’ve done this to think I’m a nutcase, I can tell by the look on their faces, but most do take their litter back – though I guess most of them probably just throw it back onto the ground once I’m out of sight.

My slightly neurotic concern about garbage isn't entirely without foundation. Consider this:

Malaysians generate about 20,000 tons of household garbage a day, and a staggering third of that comes from the Klang Valley. That's more than 6 tons a day just from K.L. and surrounding areas. That's a lot of garbage. In fact, a mathematical friend of mine calculated that 6 tons of garbage would cover the whole of the Dataran Merdeka, when spread out and if it was placed in one tall pile it would replace the Twin Towers as the country's tallest building. Imagine the fuss if we did dispose of our garbage in our cities? Yet few seem to care about huge tracts of land outside the cities which are being turned into festering dumps that ooze toxic leachate into the water system, produce copious amounts of the greenhouse gas, methane, and attract mosquitos, flies, rats and other types of odious 2, 4 and 6 legged creatures.

Kerubung landfill, Melaka

According to Alam Flora, who hold the country's biggest garbage collection concession, only 5 percent of this garbage is recycled despite the fact that the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (KPKT) have a policy to Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle (3 Rs)

What happened to those thousands of posters the ministry printed to promote the 3Rs? One showed a young mother nursing her baby on a landfill and another featured a children's playground built on top of a mound of rubbish. I don't remember seeing them in the public domain and when I tried to find them online from the ministry's website I failed. They were powerful images that would certainly make people stop and think, and surely raising public awareness would be a great first step to take towards solving the garbage problem. It would also be in-line with the spirit of Local Agenda 21 which aims to forge partnerships between local authorities, the private sector and the community in order to plan and care for their environment.

Nice place to have tea perhaps?

Local Agenda 21 is a significant part of the Global Action Plan Towards Development for the 21st Century that the Malaysian government agreed to abide by, way back in 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Even though the collection, disposal and treatment of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) falls under the aegis of Local Agenda 21, the government went ahead and federalized MSW. This gives the responsible ministry, in this case the Housing and Local Government Ministry, the right to veto Municipal Council plans and essentially dictate what system they should adopt. This strange sleight of hand has led to situations where government approved concessionaires, who manage many of the landfills, have the power to hold the local authorities to randsom.

I was also under the impression that the reason Alam Flora got their concession was because their waste management strategy was in line with the ministry's commitment to the 3Rs and therefore Local Agenda 21. Yet, in spite of messages on their website extolling the virtues of the 3Rs, they are still dumping the majority of the waste they collect onto landfills and the government regularly approves land deals for new landfills. It stinks!

Alam Flora trucks at the Taman Beringin transfer station.

It's fair to argue that in the past landfills were the only solution, but today green technology that allows for better waste management is locally available. So why isn't the government using it? Why instead are they promoting incinerators, which certainly aren't green or cost effective? Incinerator technology is not only expensive and it also relies on fossil fuels to combust the garbage. It's also an unpopular choice, remember the fight against the Broga incinerator? Also, because the garbage isn't sorted before it's incinerated, the ash that remains often contains toxins and heavy metals from noxious stuff that was in the garbage such as batteries and pesticide containers. This means the ash has to be specially treated or stored at additional cost. 

At the moment less than half of the incinerators, that have been commissioned are in operation due to technical incompatibility problems with the type of waste they have to deal with. This is because Malaysian waste is often much wetter than the waste the technology was originally designed for and so it doesn't perform to the required standard and is frequently taken off line for maintenance causing even more expense.

Courtesy of nail.uk.net

So what's going on? Why is the government flouting its own environmental legislation? In fact, Why are they even interested in the content of your dustbin in the first place? Surely this is a local, not a federal issue.

In 2008 Mariana Mohamed Osman, Syarifah Norazizan Syed A Rashid and Nobaya Ahmad conducted a study at University Putra Malaysia to determine why the government had failed to adopt Local Agenda 21 in practice. They found that the government's unwillingness to act was due to the following:

political reasons

lack of funding or competence

inefficiency due to poor infrastructure and service provision

unrealistic official standards

the lack of profit to be made...

What, profit from garbage? You betcha!

As the old English saying goes, "Where there's muck, there's brass." The collection and disposal of waste is big business. A total of RM5 billion was allocated for it under the 9th Malaysia Plan. But we have very little to show for all this money. One of Selangor's flagship projects is the Bukit Tagar sanitary landfill near Rawang which is operated by KUB Berjaya Enviro (KBE) This cost the taxpayers about RM400 million to build, including land acquisition. But we also need to factor in the additional cost to the Local Authorities (and therefore the people) of transporting waste to Bukit Tagar which is in addition to the normal tipping fee they pay. This means that it could cost between RM130 to RM150 per ton to send garbage to the Bukit Tagar landfill. With a national volume of 20,000 tins per day we're talking big business.

Aerial of Bukit Tagar landfill.

The 9th Malaysia Plan also allocated RM400 million to close and rehabilitate 16 landfills nationwide though, because of a lack of transparency, it's virtually impossible to find out who has received this allocation and what tangible improvement this expenditure has created. The Taman Beringin landfill site near Kepong is operated by Cypark at a cost so far of RM38 million but this was financed by DBKL (Kuala Lumpur City Council) it did not come out of the RM400 million allocated for such purposes and I believe the company is asking for more money.

When I visited the site recently I noticed Cypark had put in ventilation pipes to extract the methane as well as a building a leachate collection pond. They have landscaped the whole area with grass and trees. Some of the residents living right up on the boundary of the dumpsite said it was definitely a huge improvement on what had been there before. "Now it only smells bad in heavy rain," they told me. But on closer inspection around the periphery of the site (it's a restricted area) I could see that the layer of soil capping the dumpsite is very shallow and that garbage is still visible amongst the vegetation at ground level and I was told by a local resident that when it rains run-off flows off the dump and into the Municipal drains that border the site. Indeed on the day I visited, there were some students at the site measuring leachate flow, they weren't specific, but they did say there were problems.

So far the only real initiatives directed at developing a waste management system that is based on the 3Rs and genuine concern about the environment, have come from private venture companies. They invariably face many obstacles securing concessions due to the fact that they are potentially destabilizing the status quo. It all smacks of bad governance to me but there are some exceptions of course. The Kajang Municipality, for example, overcame the need to find the additional cost of transporting their garbage to Bukit Tagar by sending it to Recycle Energy Sdn. Bhd. instead. This privately funded project is a joint venture between Core Competencies Sdn. Bhd. and MMC. From their plant in Semenyih, they are currently recycling or re-using 80 percent of the 700 tons of rubbish per day they receive from Kajang and neighbouring areas for processing. But the really innovative part of this method is that it is producing renewable energy in the form of Refuse Derived Fuel which is being used to generate electricity for the national grid. Hey that's more like it!

So what can we do? Local Agenda 21 empowers the community to have a big say in the environment so it's down to each and everyone of us to start taking control, to become ecowarriorz in our own right and start asking questions and making sure we get the answers.

For my part I will keep monitoring the rubbish and will keep you updated.