[Malaysia] Piles of Rubbish

The Straits Times, Singapore
08 June 2005

Tip In My Backyard? What Utter Rubbish
By Reme Ahmad The Straits Times/ANN

Call it the Nimby Syndrome. Few people in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor state care about the 5,500 tonnes of rubbish they throw out daily--once the garbage trucks are gone. Even fewer noticed the protests by residents at the Selangor-Negeri Sembilan border against a plan to build an incinerator near their homes.

As long as it is Not In My Backyard (Nimby), people have no objections.

"Whenever we want to have a landfill, people put up Not In My Backyard opposition," says Chock Eng Tah, managing director of KUB-Berjaya Enviro, which runs a new dumpsite near Batang Berjuntai. "But the rubbish has to go somewhere," he tells The Straits Times.

And thus the lives of Batang Berjuntai residents have been changed. The town, about 70km northwest of Kuala Lumpur, is a sleepy backwater away from the country's main highways. But in the past month, dozens of huge, smelly trucks have become regular visitors. The 18-wheel blue-and-white trucks carry compacted loads of garbage thrown out by Kuala Lumpur and Selangor residents, leaving a trail of foul-smelling liquids in their wake.

The garbage is transported past the town centre to Malaysia's newest landfill 20km away, at a place called Bukit Tagar. The landfill started receiving its first loads in early April.

"Already you can smell the dirty water that flows out from the trucks everywhere. Things will get worse," says a local restaurant owner. The 5,500 tonnes of rubbish from Kuala Lumpur and Selangor residents compare with some 7,600 tonnes produced a day in Singapore.

Malaysians produce 18,000 tonnes of rubbish daily, which are buried at dozens of landfills all over the country. For comparison, land-scarce Singapore has four incineration plants.

In Batang Berjuntai, the trucks begin to appear around 6.30am--the regular starting time, according to residents. And they only stop rolling through late in the evening.

"There are so many other places to build the rubbish dump, why have it here?" asks plantation worker S Muniandy.

Officials explain that the dumpsite must be near Klang Valley that surrounds Kuala Lumpur so that garbage can be buried quickly for sanitary reasons. Setting up a site, say, in the jungles of adjoining Pahang state may sound ideal, but would raise the cost of garbage removal. A household in Kuala Lumpur pays RM36 a month for rubbish to be removed at least twice a week. Move the landfill further away, and costs could double.

The tonnes of garbage from homes, offices and industries all over Kuala Lumpur and Selangor are collected by hundreds of smaller rubbish trucks which offload at a transfer station just outside Kuala Lumpur. Here, the rubbish is compacted before their trip to the landfill.

But cost calculations and modern technology mean little to residents of Batang Berjuntai.

"We understand the logic but it is hard to agree when horrible smells and flies attack my breakfast," says retired teacher Ahmad Parjan, sitting at a roadside restaurant.

It is impossible to miss the big trucks, as the town centre is just a T-junction road which does not even have traffic lights. The biggest structures in town are a Hindu temple, a mosque and a Chinese temple located within 100m of each other, near the T-junction. The tallest buildings are a row of three-storey shophouses.

The trucks, which travel in convoys of five, make their way to a road outside town linking it to the Bukit Tagar dumpsite, which is surrounded by oil palm plantations. The 260-ha landfill, behind scenic hills, is off limits to outsiders.

The government says the landfill will hold 120 million tonnes of garbage and can be used for 40 years. It will replace an older one in Puchong, between Kuala Lumpur and the airport.

The old landfill will be closed as many residential developments have come up in the area lately and residents there are up in arms over the unpleasant smells and swarms of flies.

But dumpsites are not the only bugbear for Malaysians. The fate of a RM1.5bn incinerator and landfill at the edge of the Selangor-Negeri Sembilan border--the subject of the Nimby protest mentioned earlier--is in limbo after angry residents in the area obtained a court order to block the project.

Broga town is the second proposed site for the incinerator after an earlier plan to build it in the Kuala Lumpur suburb of Petaling Jaya was scuttled by residents there. Community leaders had threatened to galvanise 260,000 residents living within a 5-km radius of the planned plant to vote for the opposition if the incinerator was built. So that plan was dumped.

Meanwhile, the piles of rubbish grow.