Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Today I will talk a little about something which me and my family have been trying to do what little part we could in reducing the amount of waste generated per household as well as reduce CO2 (carbon dioxide) emission. CO2 emission is a big, if not the major, contributor to global warming. I am no expert in knowing all the mechanics of global warming as well as solid waste management, but I believe each one of us should at least be aware that whatever seemingly insignificant decisions we make in our daily lives we could potentially make the already bad situation worse.

The government recently announced that the Housing and Local Government will present the Solid Waste Management Bill to Cabinet, which after it gets approved will be tabled in Parliament for passing. According to Ong Ka Ting, one of the focus of the bill will be the practice of 3R - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - which will go into reducing the overall amount of solid waste generated by each household in Malaysia. In what way would the bill enforce garbage separation, I have no idea as I am not privy to its details (readers who know better please provide us with details). The other focus of the bill seems to be on the creation of a single corporation that will oversee and manage the current solid waste concessionaires, determining KPIs as well as strategies to be followed by them. Local authorities will play the role of watchdog as well as enforce laws governing waste collection and disposal. There will be a consumer tribunal for complaints as well as a "reasonable" charge which Najib says will depends on "what we (the government) think the public can afford to pay".

First on the matter of 3R. This is where Malaysians would have the most role to play, yet the hardest to control and enforce from the point of view of the government. We have no lack of media as well as NGO campaigns regarding the importance of recycling as well as the benefits, but all of us know how pathetic the result have been. I am not sure what is the exact cause of the problem. Perhaps it's more of a combination of factors - apathy, ignorance, hassle, lack of institutional support. Apathy is one difficult animal to tackle as it is usually easier to move a mountain then to change a person's attitude. Ignorance and hassle could be removed if people are willing to listen and learn why they could and should practice 3R. With the proposed bill, perhaps institutional support and enforcement could be strengthened.

I guess most of us know the problems we are facing regarding solid waste management in this country. People have to understand that our waste problem does not end with our garbage bag collected by the trucks. The traditional method that our country has been doing is to use landfills for the disposal of these waste, and overtime bury them with soil. But landfills requires huge plots of land and usually fills up very quickly due to the evergrowing enormous amount of garbage we produce daily. We have seen our fairshare of big landfills which ultimately have been closed down due to them reaching their capacity, as well as the suitability of the locations which used to be far away from residential areas, but are not anymore due to population and township growth. Some examples are the Kelana Jaya dumpsite (now filled with condos, a stadium, and commercial development), Subang Airport road (used to stink badly whenever you use the road to the airport, but now a residential area with condos and houses), Sri Kembangan/Air Hitam (which I am not mistaken was closed end of last year), and the Selayang landfill visible from the MRR2.

Readers would remember as well that one of the alternatives to landfills decided by the government was the use of incinerators. Particularly of the gigantic type as per the still-unknown-status Broga incinerator in Semenyih which courted controversy due to questions on its location in a catchment area as well as the Japanese contractor which has questionable projects back in its home country. Nobody like to have a waste processing plant behind their backyard (remember that the incinerator was first proposed to be in Puchong but was relocated due to residents' and political pressure) but the truth of the matter is with the amount of garbage we generate, something has to be done to cope with its ultimate disposal. Remember, the problem of garbage does not end after we see our bins beeing emptied into the dumpster truck. Let's face it, we will continue to have challenges in disposing of the amount of garbage we have. The government is not lacking in trying to tackle that problem, even though the idea of smaller, more efficient and manageable incinerators would be a better idea than the biggest incinerator of its kind in the world. What each of us Malaysians could do to play our part is to reduce the amount of garbage we produce each day.

If you look around your household today, you would be surprised at the number of things which are either made from recycled materials, or are recycleable. The same goes with the usual things we discard without thinking most of the time. How many of you have dumped a whole stack of newspaper (The Sun, especially since it's free) into the garbage bin? How many of you have chucked away your can of Coke or 100PLUS once you've emptied it? And how many of you have dumped empty cartons of milk and juice into the bin without even blinking an eye? Or chucked away envelopes once we opened letters? Our culture is such that we dumped almost everything we automatically think as waste into the garbage bin, usually without even thinking or batting an eyelid. It is no wonder then why we seem to face the problem of evergrowing household garbage contributing to filling up landfills faster than ever before. If each and everyone of us would just stop and think for just 10 seconds or so before we instinctively throw things away we would be able to reduce as much as half of garbage generation.

Once you get into this habit of stopping and questioning before you open up the lid of the bin and throw things in, the battle is already half won. The next thing will be to decide if the thing you no longer want could be reused or recycled. The number of materials one could recycle is huge, and better still, these recycleable waste is worth some money! I list some of the more common items here, which, of course, you should clean before storing:-

- aluminium cans, tins, foils: soft drinks, beer, juice, chocolate wrappers, cooking foils
- tins, cans: milk powder, condensed/evaporated milk, milo, beverage, canfood
- aseptic and virgin pulp packaging: milk cartons, juice cartons, beverage
- glass: glass bottles, jars, drinking glasses, mirrors
- PET (plastic) bottles: water bottles, soft drink, beverage
- mixed plastic: toys, packaging, oil packs, toiletries packaging, etc. you could determine if the plastic could be recycled by looking for the common recycle symbol printed on most of them. However, my principle is that I lump all plastics together as most could be melted down.
- paper: newspapers, envelopes, brochures, books, magazines, printing papers, unwanted documents, shredded paper, etc
- cardboard: boxes of all shapes and sizes, cardboard fillers, food box packaging
- wood: could be collected as garden organic waste by concessionaire
- batteries: try to use rechargeable ones, but batteries could be collected and recycled as well
- metals: worth quite a lot nowadays...why do you think manhole covers are missing, water meters and gate ornaments are stolen?
- monitors, tv, electrical items: there are collection centers, sometimes in the neighbourhood, where these are either stripped down or refurbished.

One way to organize these items is to have separate bags or boxes to store and separate them - hence the idea of garbage separation. I use bags which I store in my back kitchen. I usually collect and separate for some 3 months before I bring all of them down to a Alam Flora (the solid waste concessionaire for central Malaysia) recycling center where they would be weighed and I will be paid. The amount is not much (Alam Flora's rate is available here) but what is more important is our contribution towards solid waste management by reducing the amount of garbage that has to be carried away by the dumpster. By practising this, you would start to notice that most of the waste that ends up in the garbage bin are organic in nature which would have less problem degrading in landfills, and easily incinerated. It is not rocket science, and all of us could and should play our role. It is a habit which could be cultivated easily. I am proud to say that our office also encourages recycling, especially paper which we generate huge amount daily. We have separate bins for paper, aluminium, plastics, as well as batteries. Sadly though, a lot of staff still do not practise it as I usually see soft drink cans and newspapers in their wastepaper baskets.

What about reducing CO2 emission? The obvious way is to reduce private use of vehicles, carpool as much as possible, and use the public transport. However, transportation in Malaysia presents its own set of problems which makes it almost impossible (especially in Klang Valley) to reduce private vehicle use daily. But there is one thing you could do in your household - reduce electricity use. Most of the time we have the habit of leaving electrical equipment, especially audio/visual related ones, on standby mode. By switching off the electricity supply to all these "standby" equipment you could reduce up to 10% of electricity consumption, according to some studies. Turn them on only when you need to use them. Electrical ovens in the kitchen are good candidates to not let them run on standby mode. Use energy efficient light bulbs and tubes throughout the house as they produce more light and use much less electricity compared to incandescent bulbs.

Airconditioning consumes high levels of electricity, but that is because Malaysians have this habit of lowering down the temperature to 16 degrees C (the lowest possible)! In almost all cases setting the temperature to 23-25 deg C would ensure a most comfortable and cold enough room. If you couple that with a ceiling fan switched to low speed of 1 or 2, the temperature of the room would go even lower. This simple act would have ensured the airconditioning compressor to switch on only half the time. Not only do you reduce your monthly electricity bill, but you and your household also contribute to lowering overall CO2 emission from electricity generation as new demand could be met increasingly with existing power plants.

Recycling has become a habit of sorts in European countries, and have succeeded in reducing overall amount of solid waste that is generated, thus making it easier to manage them. On the contrary, the Americans are behaving almost like us in that they would throw everything without pause. Education and information dissemination through media campaigns and government involvement is key to changing Malaysians' attitude and behaviour with regards to this. However, I believe the government could also use law and enforcement to produce the intended habit and behaviour as people are usually to set in their ways to change. This is especially so when the benefits from practising 3R are not that direct and visible to them. Thus, the other method to be employed would be a somewhat punitive one.

There has been talk by the government for some years about enforcing compulsory garbage separation. It is not an easy thing to do, and I am not sure if the newest bill has ways of tackling this. We could learn from the Taipei example where to encourage and enforce garbage separation and reduction, Taipei households could use only a special type of garbage bag, failing which the garbage would not be collected. These DEP (Department of Environmental Protection) garbage bags are expensive and is a form of taxation, or fee, for garbage collection and processing. The use of such bags produces a form of "pay as you throw" service. The idea is that you would think twice or thrice before you simply throw things into the expensive DEP bags. The DEP bags are the only non-recycleable waste garbage bags which the garbage collectors will collect. However, all other recycleable items can be separated and packed into other types of bags and they would be collected as well as long as the collectors could see that they have been separated. These separated and recycleable items are collected by special recycling trucks (not unlike the garden organic waste collection trucks we have now currently).

The Malaysian government could implement something similar here as the concept has proven itself. However, some of the challenges I see is the habit of Malaysians throwing garbage into a little corner or under a tree by the roadside. This is not only a problem in rural or urban squatter areas. In fact, in most middle class residential areas you will always have some social misfits who would insist in dumping by the roadside. I have seen similar cases in my area, and have even filed complaints with the local council. I cannot understand why these misfits and social scourge would not want to leave their garbage in their own garbage bin to be collected, but would rather walk the length of the road and dump them under a tree. But this is something which could be reduced by comprehensive enforcement, especially when the proposed bill is focusing on local authorities playing the enforcement and watchdog role in solid waste management. Residents could also play a role by always having a lookout for such misfits and report accordingly to the authorities. Trust me, the local authorities are more than happy to act on your complaints as long as it is informative and detailed enough. The Shah Alam City Council even has an online complain system which works, and acted upon effectively!

To recap, all of us can and should play our role in helping to reduce the amount of household garbage we produce daily. Pause and think before you instinctively throw things into the garbage bin. Reuse, and separate and recycle whatever that could be, and bring them to the various recycle centers run by solid waste management concessionaires. Use energy efficient bulbs, switch off completely electrical equipment not in use, and set the airconditioning temperature to no less than 22 degrees C. If possible, reduce private vehicle use for commuting to and from work. Be also a responsible Malaysian by not dumping garbage anywhere you want. Report such misfits when you encounter them to the local authorities. While we wait for the bill to be tabled in Parliament, we could do all this, and continue to do them after the passage of the bill.

Let's hope that the bill would include practical plans to ensure Malaysians would reduce and recycle as much as possible, while producing the intended habit and behaviour with respect to solid waste management through appropriate enforcement and "pay as you throw". Already the business of recycling in the private sector in this country has grown quite a bit as there is money to be made from "garbage". The remaining part of the equation is us, Malaysians. After all, we do not want our country to face a perpetual problem of opening and closing landfills, building mega incinerators instead of smaller ones which is more manageable and geographically distributed out evenly, and at the end of the day see the problem get worse because we, Malaysians, fail to play our part in reducing our garbage.

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