Issues (Malaysia): Is solid waste polluting our drinking water??

Tourists enjoying the cool environment of Cameron Highlands are unaware that the rubbish they leave behind end up in open dumps such as this.

Were landfills the culprits behind the recent contamination of Sungai Selangor? Maybe yes, maybe no. The results of investigation are still under wraps but for those familiar with the management of solid waste, the findings do not matter. They know that landfills all over the country have, for years, been fouling our streams and will continue doing so.

Let’s face it – we know for a fact that almost all of the “official” dumpsites that we have, some 144, are open dumps with no pollution control whatsoever. And many are sited close to streams and rivers. Only three can claim to be engineered landfills with facilities to treat leachate, the highly contaminated waste water leaking from waste tips – the Ayer Hitam and Bukit Tagar landfills in Selangor and Seelong landfill in Johor.

The sad thing is, we throw out stuff by the tonnes each day and yet in almost the whole country, there is no proper dumpsite to take in the discards safely.

Dr P. Agamuthu, professor of solid and hazardous waste management at Universiti Malaya, traces the sad state of affairs to the absence of a national policy and legislation on municipal waste. “Because there is no policy, there is no proper system on how rubbish should be handled and disposed of.”

The Solid Waste Management Bill, drafted in the 1990s, is still nowhere in sight despite annual assurances from the government that it would be tabled “this year.” Agamuthu says the Bill will pave the way for improved waste handling and disposal as well as waste minimisation.

In its absence, some local governments are still establishing open dumps, blatantly ignoring the Housing and Local Government Ministry’s 1990 Technical Guidelines on Sanitary Landfills, Design Operations which proposed that all new landfills be at Levels 3 and 4 (with anti-pollution features).

Under the proposed privatisation of solid waste management, waste concessionaires have inherited some of the polluting sites since 1997. They have closed some of the foulest ones while upgrading others. But with the privatisation plan still interim, the concessionaires are unwilling to spend more. Thus improvements on the old landfills have been slight, such as using daily soil cover and containing leachate in oxidation ponds.

“That is the most we can do with the budget that we have,” says D.L. Ho, group general manager of Southern Waste Management (SWM) which operates in Malacca, Negri Sembilan and Johor. Moreover, he adds, old dumps were not built with liners and leachate-collection pipes and installing these is impossible now.

His firm closed down 20 dumps after taking over waste collection services in 1997. It retained another 20, but not before first determining that they are downstream of water intake points.

Many landfills remain in the hands of local authorities who cannot afford upgrading works. So the pollution persists. Agamuthu has found high levels of heavy metals such as lead, chromium, iron, arsenic and cadmium in effluents of some landfills.

The pollution has seeped into the land. The Department of Environment (DOE) found over half of the groundwater samples taken in 2004 from 27 wells near several landfills with arsenic, iron, manganese, sulphates and sewage pollution above acceptable values. Levels of cadmium, lead and chromium were over the benchmark in less than 5% of the samples.

Licence to pollute

While sanitary landfills are regularly inspected – they must undergo Environmental Impact Assessments and operators submit monthly monitoring reports on discharges and river water quality as well as quarterly environment audits – hundreds of other dumps, despite their known threats, escape scrutiny.

It seems DOE and other related agencies, keeping in mind the history behind our dumps, have kept one eye closed. DOE even issues contravention licences (which allow industries to legally contravene the Environmental Quality Act 1974) to waste concessionaires such as Alam Flora.

“We have to have contravention licence as the discharges cannot comply with requirements,” says Mohamed Siraj Abdul Razack, chief executive officer of Alam Flora. “You cannot blame us because the waste is already buried, there is no way to put in liners and the landfill is already next to the river. DOE has been helpful and flexible. If it shuts down the landfills, there will be a rubbish crisis.”

Siraj maintains that upgrading work has prevented pollution from the bigger landfills. He says the smaller landfills do not present high risks as leachate discharges, being small and gradual, would be diluted in streams.

But is DOE being too lenient and generous with its contravention licence? Worldwide Landfills which operates the Ayer Hitam landfill, has held the licence since Day One.

One can understand why licences were given for old dumps, but for one that is supposed to be an engineered landfill?

The company general manager Zamri Abdul Rahman says the biological treatment which channels leachate through several aerated ponds and rely on bacteria for decomposition, could not reduce the level of COD to within Standard B requirements. (COD or chemical oxygen demand is the amount of oxygen taken up by organic matter in water and is used to measure organic waste in water or effluent.)

“DOE has very stringent standards on COD but aware that landfill leachate is expensive and difficult to treat, it has been flexible and gave us the contravention licence,” says Zamri.

And is DOE’s generosity with polluters being exploited? It seems so in the case of the Taman Beringin landfill in Kepong. City Hall built a RM4mil leachate treatment plant there three years ago but the facility was hardly used after the initial six-month trial period. Fortunately, the landfill was finally closed last week after many postponements over the years; otherwise it would have continued contaminating streams which feed into Sungai Klang.

There is also concern over the Bukit Tagar landfill in Batang Berjuntai, said to be the source of the Sungai Selangor contamination. Because its leachate treatment plant is still under construction – the opening of the landfill was hastened because of pressure to close the Ayer Hitam and Taman Beringin landfills – wastewater is treated conventionally in oxidation ponds. Many in the industry doubt that the treatment method could bring the pollution levels low enough to meet Standard A requirements, which landfills sited upstream of water intake points must comply with.

In fact, requiring landfill discharges to meet either Standard A or B (for landfills downstream of water intake points) is pointless if contravention licences are still issued and nobody keeps watch. Which is why waste experts say it is crucial to site landfills away from water catchment areas; more so since accidents do happen such as at Bukit Tagar where a pipe valve was left open, resulting in leachate spillage but which the landfill operator insists did not enter Sungai Selangor.

Agamuthu believes the government should seriously consider the Solid Waste Management Bill and incorporate within it, an integrated approach which stresses on a variety of treatment and disposal options such as composting, biological treatment, biogasification and incineration and, of course, waste minimisation such as through environment design and recycling.

With landfills being polluting, and making them non-polluting costly, it makes sense to reduce our waste heaps. So the next time you chuck that old battery or plastic bag into the trash bin, stop – the waste might well cause a stink in your tap water.