Mary Maguire said...
Hey Sampahman, don't believe all you read. I was so pissed off with these special reports that I wrote to the editor as follows:
Dear Sir,
I am writing in response to the special reports about waste management that appeared in the Nation section of your newspaper on November 1st and 2nd.
While I applaud any attempt to inform the public about this serious social and environmental problem, I was appalled to discover that the series of articles you ran were biased in favour of the politico-corporate cartel that has been running this industry for years. There was no mention at all of the other initiatives that are already taking place in the country which deal with municipal solid waste from a different perspective.
The articles rightly pointed out the problems associated with landfills but to suggest that incinerators are the only option is at best misleading and at worst a deliberate attempt to keep the rate-paying public misinformed.
Incinerator technology is very expensive to build and it operates on traditional non-renewable fuel which means daily running costs are not only high, but they are also unstable due to fluctuations in the global oil price.
A lot of countries that adopted incinerator technology are now moving towards a waste to energy approach to solve municipal waste problems. This approach regards garbage as a valuable resource and reclaims as much as possible in the form of reuseable items and an alternative and renewable industrial fuel which can also be used to generate electricity.
My concern is that there was no mention of this in the so-called in-depth report Don't you think the rate-paying public deserve to be told that there are alternative ways of approaching waste management that are cheaper and environmentally cleaner?
+++++
Well, Mary, your letter did not see print but this one by Chock Eng Tah, Managing Director of KUB-Berjaya Enviro Sdn Bhd, did. HERE
You still think we need to continue to keep our fingers crossed?
Hey Sampahman, what else can you expect from a member of the cartel. He's right about incinerators and sanitary landfills. BUT what he didn't say was that resource recovery technology is quite a lot cheaper than the cost of a sanitary landfill and more importantly, as up to 80% of raw waste can be recovered, the land isn't covered in rubbish...all those resources just lying there in perpetuity - what a waste.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing the cartel doesn't seem to get is that resource recovery technology won't put them out of business, as it doesn't eliminate the need for landfills entirely because not everything we throw away is recoverable. So there's still going to be a need for sanitary landfills - just less of them as they will last a lot, lot longer.
The problem is that the cartel have had a monopoly on waste collection and disposal for years and they don't want that to change so they are putting their own interests before those of the rate payers and the environment. (40-60% of assessment is spent on waste management)
Waste management isn't a federal issue it's a local one. Different communities have slightly different waste profiles and needs so it makes perfect sense, to de-centralise waste management and integrate all available technologies to provide the best service to the public.