Broga Incinerator is Off: Good News or Bad News?

The Broga Incinerator project is now officially, "Burnt", thanks to unsustainable cost, that's the official reason from the Malaysian government.

While the people, especially those in the vicinity of the proposed project cheered and breathed a sigh of relief, ought others follow suit?

The problem of waste disposal is faced by every community and nation globally and the more "modernized" and "industrialized", the bigger and more complex the problem.

While incinerating waste is one of the many alternatives in waste disposal, it has it's very serious residual waste and gas emission problems.

It is a fact that burning common plastics like PVC releases toxic and carcinogenic substances like Dioxin and the concentrated residue at the end of the incineration process needs disposal too, and more often that not, these are concentrated toxic waste.

My take of the situation is that the Malaysian government finally woke up to the fact that they themselves may not be able to meet the strict environmental standards they have legislated, so better to abort now then face the inevitable embarrassment down the road.

However, if we look at the solid waste disposal problem in Malaysia, we cannot escape from the fact that continue the "business as usual" basis is going to bury us all in waste.

If we continue to generate and landfill waste at the rate we are doing now, sooner or later, we are going to ran out of land.

Looking across the Causeway, in land scarce Singapore, they are even running out of land to bury the dead, let alone rubbish!

Singapore had gone the incineration route for more than two decades already and had it not been so, she would have another hill, Bukit Sampah, besides Bukit Timah.

It is true that incineration always cost more, ton for ton of rubbish, but buried rubbish is not something that will go away within a generation or two; it will come back to haunt our future generations.

The only long term viable and sustainable way out seems to lie in the 4Rs: Review, Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.

If the net total of necessary waste can be reduced to its absolute minimum, whether it is incineration or burying, either one will be equally viable.

Waste sorted at source is the way to go.

Organic waste ought to be composted and returned to the land as food for other organism. Reducing, reusing and recycling will help but the best of all is for all of us to review our consumption habits: Do I really need to consume this, in this wasteful manner?

Eventually, when we waste not, we want not!