THROWING AWAY THE CHANCE TO IMPROVE WASTE POLICY?

Solid waste can be defined as the useless and unwanted products in the solid state derived from the activities of and discarded by society. Just as children depend on their parents for shelter and sustainability, mankind depends on the environment to sustain their lives. The environment consists of every single living being on Earth, from the smallest microorganism to the giant whale that swims in the depths of the ocean. 

Solid waste is one of the three major environmental problems in Malaysia. It plays a significant role in the ability of Nature to sustain life within its capacity. Currently, over 23,000 tonnes of waste is produced each day in Malaysia. However, this amount is expected to rise to 30,000 tonnes by the year 2020. The amount of waste generated continues to increase due to the increasing population and development, and only less than 5% of the waste is being recycled.

Issues & Problems

Litter at the roadside, drains clogged up with rubbish and rivers filled with filthy garbage definitely indicate that solid waste is a major environmental problem in Malaysia. Rapid development, population increase and changes in consumption pattern directly (and indirectly) resulted in the generation of enormous amount of waste, ranging from biodegradable to synthetic waste.

As of the year of 2008, 23,000 tonnes of waste is produced each day in Malaysia, with less than 5% of the waste is being recycled. An alarming 19% of waste ends up in our drains, which then causes flash floods and drainage blockage. This situation has been and will be reducing our environmental capacity to sustain life.

Despite the massive amount and complexity of waste produced, the standards of waste management in Malaysia are still poor. These include outdated documentation of waste generation rates and its composition, inefficient storage and collection systems, disposal of municipal wastes with toxic and hazardous waste, indiscriminate disposal or dumping of wastes and inefficient utilization of disposal site space.
 

In Malaysian municipal waste, about 75% is food waste that again will end of in the landfills. All these food waste can be used for compost but due to some reasons. The high amount of organics in the landfill will cause the leachate to have very high BOD and COD. It also decrease the pH of the landfills and make it acidic. Also when all these organics are being used by bacteria (anaerobic), the amount of Methane released from the landfill is really high. Although this methane can be captured and used to produce energy, but in Malaysia, they prefer to just burn it as it will have less impact as CO₂.

Each day Malaysians produce about 19,000 tonnes of garbage (2,100 tonnes in KL). All of that waste has to go somewhere! Right now the trash is disposed of in 176 garbage dumps (over here they use the British term "garbage tips"). However, "illegal dumping" is common. Of these active dumps, only 8 are "sanitary landfills" that have been designed with modern pollution control features. The rest are open dump sites whose locations were not chosen for environmental reasons, but rather because they were convenient places to dump trash. In addition, there are over 100 closed dump sites, most of which were not properly designed for pollution control so they are potentially sites for the production of flammable gasses or pollutants that can leach into the water supply.  

Furthermore, the lack of awareness and knowledge among Malaysian community about solid waste management (SWM) issues, and being ignorant about the effect that improper SWM has to us has definitely worsened the problem.

Questions?? 

1. How to boost the proper implementation and enforcement of waste policy? 

  

My suggestions is : 

• Extension of the knowledge basis of the Malaysian Commission
• Regulation of the civil society participation and facilitating the civil society monitoring activity.
• Preventive rather than a punishing method for ensuring compliance
• Enable civil society to spot and report illegal activities - creating a common “language” between stakeholders

2. What could narrow the gaps between the advanced and less advanced Member states?

My suggestions is:

• Moving from waste disposal to recycling- creative use of the state approach as a means to tackle the gaps between government and citizens
• Consideration of integrated costs of collection and treatment schemes
• Intensifying political awareness
• A structure for best practice exchange between member states

3. The new waste framework directive introduced an enriched, ambitious yet binding hierarchy. How enforceable is it? 

• Set separate collection as the default choice for local authorities
• Harmonized recycling criteria, linked to legal obligations by Member state.
• A broadly accepted proper methodology for the application of the waste treatment hierarchy.
• Setting targets for prevention, reuse and bio-waste recycling
• Clarification of the status of co-incineration/co-processing
• Embed waste policy principles as conditionality clauses for government funding.
• “Performance contracts” for waste management
• Allocation rules for landfill or incineration taxes
• Harmonization of calculation methods and data collection.

According to Dr. Abu Bakar Jaafar, the chairman of the Association of Environmental Consultants and Contractors of Malaysia, the waste management situation in Malaysia has not been improving over time. According to Dr. Abu Bakar "a waste management report submitted to by Malaysia to the United Nations in 1971 bore close resemblance to the current situation". Part of the problem is that Malaysia currently does not have appropriate laws and that management of waste and enforcement of waste management laws required involvement of at least 11 different governmental ministries.

The government has identified 16 waste dumps located near rivers or the sea where the leaching of pollutants from the site could be especially harmful. All of these sites have been closed and are under various phases of "rehabilitation". Recently, leaching of pollutants from an abandoned dump fouled a water treatment plant and cut off the local water supply, so this is still an important issue to be dealt with here.

An alternative to storing waste in landfills, is to incinerate wastes, which carries its own set of environmental issues. There are currently several waste incinerators being built in Malaysia. Not surprisingly, many of these are being built on islands where the space for landfills is limited.

So Do You Know About What Happens to Your Garbage?

"Out of sight, out of mind" is the phrase that probably best describes our interest in solid waste management. We make it, the garbage man takes it away, and then we don't care what happens to it. So what does happen to it? I imagine that not all of you are lucky enough to be friends with the person in charge of solid waste management in your town like I am. I have visited the Jeram Sanitary Landfill as part of a field trip for an environmental assignment during my study. It was a very interesting place to visit. I suggest that you all learn more about what happens to your trash, how much waste disposal is costing you, and what are the potential problems with the form of waste management that your town currently uses.