REHMAN RASHID: Salute to a failed venture in waste disposal

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2007/07/17

REHMAN RASHID: Salute to a failed venture in waste disposal

By : REHMAN RASHID

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THE final a-Broga-tion of the RM1.5 billion incinerator project evoked in me mixed feelings of relief and regret.

Regret, because I’d met some of the technology’s developers, having visited Japan in 2003 on a fact-finding tour of their operations. I am sorry that my Japanese acquaintances had to spend five years of their lives and careers in the limbo of this project, only to wind up having to pack up from their KL condos, get their kids out of international school and go home with nothing sold, nothing built, nothing done. This won’t look good on their resumès.

Relief, because having seen how well this technology served its purpose in Japan, I deeply doubted it could work here. The Ebara Corporation of Japan had offered Malaysia incinerator technology that was all about phase transitions. Operating at higher temperatures than other systems, the process melts solids into liquids, vaporises liquids into gas, then breaks down gasses to reduce emissions to a tenth or less of World Health Organisation standards.

What ash remains is itself melted into an inert slag that can be turned into paving bricks and road surfacing. They were thinking up new uses for it all the time.

The Japanese were rightly proud of their technology. Their plants were spotless; their floors polished to the semblance of still waters. They were run like supertankers: totally computerised and automated; operated by about 20 technicians in glass-walled control rooms.
Apart from the receiving bays and conveyor belts where the garbage was sorted on its way to fiery oblivion, all spaces occupied by humans were hermetically sealed, smelling of naught but a muted hint of air freshener. Yet, the entire process from silo to smokestack was visible on banks of plasma-screen CCTV monitors. There were even cameras trained on the top of the chimney, or "flue exhaust", out of which there appeared nothing at all; not even a heat shimmer.

Sato-san, my corporate guide (not his real name, of course, he has enough troubles as it is) told me sticking one’s head down that pipe would be less harmful than smoking a cigarette. (He later provided data to back up that assertion, along with the WHO factoid cited above.)

But this did not accord with the anxieties of the people of Broga, Semenyih, Selangor, who feared a cancer factory on their doorstep; a monstrous polluter outrageously posing as a pollution solution. Their campaign made graphic use of Industrial Revolution imagery: Black clouds billowing from a 19th-century factory chimney.

Sato-san was deeply hurt by this. His company’s plants, though not exactly inconspicuous, were physically no more obtrusive than modest shopping malls, to which he’d noticed scant aversion among Malaysians. In some parts of Japan, they were shopping malls. There was one model project where a revolving restaurant had been built halfway up the incinerator flue.

The safety of these facilities and the innocuousness of their emissions was clear for everyone to see. After all, said Sato-san, resting his case, weren’t the Japanese the longest-lived people in the world, with the lowest incidence of cancer and heart disease?

Ruefully, I had to tell him that, despite the best efforts of certain former administrations, Malaysians had not demonstrated much of an aptitude for turning Japanese. For instance, see how Japanese households so neatly separate their rubbish into colour-coded bags of glass, plastic, paper and organic waste.

See how garbage trucks are really vans, compact enough to scuttle about the narrow warrens of Japan’s neighbourhoods, serving communities and not conurbations. See how waste incinerators snuggle up to municipalities, located conveniently enough for people to drop off their rubbish themselves.

This was why the incinerator had been originally slated for Puchong, smack-dab in the middle of the Klang Valley’s industrial suburbia. The system was designed to operate in intimate symbiosis with trashmakers.

But though "small is beautiful" in Japan, Malaysia had been raised to think mega. The plant was to be four times bigger than anything Ebara had built before. The people of Puchong had protested mightily, and the project had been relocated out of town to the rural enclave of Broga, whose people had also protested mightily.

In the end, after years of trouble and expense for the project contractors, maintaining offices and staff here, diverting resources from other projects, and suffering terrible public relations, the Malaysian government axed the project on the basis of unacceptable cost.

This was the right call. For the 1,500 tonnes of garbage a day the plant was to have processed, 1,000 lorries a day would have had to lumber and splatter to and fro, wrecking existing roads and requiring new ones. While the plant itself could be run by a couple of dozen technicians, a small army of manual workers would have been needed to sort the rubbish Malaysian households will probably never bother sorting themselves.

And the protests. And the lawsuits. And the political fallout: manna from heaven for the opposition; flaming meteorites for the government.

Sayonara, Sato-san. It’s not that your technology is not fit for this country; this country is not fit for it. We’ll have to find other ways to avoid living amid mountains of garbage with lakeside views of cesspits. Our most promising innovation in waste management so far: The Klang municipality’s offer of 10 sen per kilo for rubbish, encouraging the theft of garbage instead of scrap metal.