Asia-Pacific, Civil Society, Development & Aid, Environment, Headlines

ENVIRONMENT-MALAYSIA: Costly Incinerators or Efficient Waste Disposal?

Anil Netto* - IPS/IFEJ

PENANG, Mar 23 2007 (IPS) - Malaysia has announced that it may set up more incinerators to deal with mounting piles of waste in landfills – just six months after a mega-incinerator project was scrapped following an outcry from residents.

A government committee was preparing a report on a plan to build more incinerators in the country, revealed Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak. The committee had already received about 150 proposals to build incinerators from various parties.

The deputy premier, who chairs a cabinet committee on solid waste management, said it was just a matter of time before incinerators or a cluster of incineration plants were built. Malaysians, he added, would just have to accept them.

Kuala Lumpur may have a new incinerator within the next five years while the historical city of Malacca further south has submitted a request for one. ‘‘Landfills cannot be an option for central Malacca due to rapid urbanisation and development,” said Malacca chief minister Mohd Ali Mohd Rustam, adding that surrounding areas serve as important water catchments.

Anti-incinerator campaigners are not impressed. ‘‘Now they are going to build incinerators everywhere,” says Ooi, an anti-incinerator campaigner who was part of the successful campaign to halt the 1,500-tonne behemoth at Broga, 45 kilometres from Kuala Lumpur. ‘‘But they failed twice in building a big one (first in Puchong in Kuala Lumpur and later at the new site in Broga).

In Broga, a valley of forests, scenic hills, and water catchment areas, residents rose to protest amidst worries about dioxin pollution, the disposal of toxic incinerator ash and costly incinerator maintenance.

‘‘It’s the same old issue of how to control and monitor the dioxins. And it is going to be very tedious maintenance work, even with Japanese assistance – and Malaysians are not known for their maintenance culture,” adds Ooi.

In a well-publicised visit, Najib earlier this month toured the 250 million U.S. dollar Chuo incinerator plant in Tokyo to look at how rubbish is turned into recycled material such as concrete and plasterboard. The plant uses the heat generated in burning 600 tonnes of rubbish daily to generate 50,000 kilowatts of power, which can light up 35,000 houses in Tokyo, local news reports said.

The pro-establishment ‘New Straits’ daily touted Japanese technology in an editorial, arguing that the country had brought the full force of its technological brilliance to bear on incineration technology, melting even the incinerator ash into innocuous material and reducing emissions to a tenth or less of the standards set by the World Health Organisation. ‘‘It is said that sticking one’s head down a modern Japanese incinerator chimney is less risky than smoking a single cigarette.”

But the paper conceded that such technology could be stymied by the low-level of segregation and recycling of waste in Malaysian households – which would make subsequent incineration inefficient.

Waste in Malaysia is generally more ‘wet’ and there is hardly any separation of organic and inorganic waste – which would have been a logical first step, as more than half the waste in Malaysia is organic.

Only about 5-15 per cent of waste in Malaysia is recycled, compared to much higher levels in some developed nations.

According to the Malaysian Newsprint Industries, a private joint venture newsprint supplier, Malaysian publishers use about 250,000 tonnes of newsprint a year, of which only 100,000 tonnes is recovered. ‘‘That’s like throwing away 2.55 million trees into the landfills,” it said on its website.

Few would dispute that the government’s recycling campaign and its collection points, with large bins in three colours for the various types of waste, have been a failure. Where they existed, many of these bins were inaccessible or full of un-segregated rubbish. And most households did not have easy access to such recycling collection points.

In this throwaway society, Kuala Lumpur alone discards some 3,000 tonnes of solid waste every day.

Half a year is all it took for the government to announce its renewed interest in incinerators following the scrapping of the Broga incinerator.

But the termination of the 425 million US dollar project, awarded to Japanese engineering giant Ebara Corp, reportedly led to a warning from Japan that such action ‘‘would not be beneficial to the promotion of foreign investment to Malaysia”.

Japan accounts for 10 per cent of Malaysia’s global trade.

Only months earlier, in December 2005, the two countries had signed the Japan-Malaysia Economic Partnership Agreement (JMEPA), a bilateral free trade agreement which came into force last July.

Environmentalists and anti-incinerator campaigners in the region are concerned that such bilateral agreements with Southeast Asian countries could pave the way for the setting up of ‘waste colonies” in the region.

They have protested against the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA), which they say contains disturbing provisions that could allow Japan to export toxic waste such as incinerator ash to the Philippines, which has banned incinerators. Japan’s response – that it would not allow such exports – has failed to dispel the environmentalists’ concerns.

In response to those who tout the supposedly cleaner incinerator technology in Japan these days, researcher Mageswari Sangaralingam of the Consumers Association of Penang said, ‘‘They may have brought down the level of emissions of dioxins and other pollutants like heavy metals and mercury, but they still get accumulated in the soil and in the food chain over time.”

If the money (allocated for incinerators) was used for effective waste minimisation, recycling and organic composting programmes, then the amount of waste would be much less and they would not have to turn to incinerators, she told IPS.

(*This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development by IPS – Inter Press Service and IFEJ – International Federation of Environmental Journalists.)