LETTERS: In Malaysia, the thought of using an incinerator is still fixated on the dense, toxic smoke emitted from its massive chimney, and building a plant may require a heavy and hefty capital outlay.
But now, those presumptions have become outdated.
There are stringent pollution control measures at waste-to-energy (WTE) plants — one third of the incineration process is devoted to flue gas treatment to control pollution.
The flue gas is passed through electrostatic precipitators to remove 99.7 per cent of the dust.
The gas then goes through catalytic bag filters where dioxin — a highly toxic pollutant and powerful carcinogen produced from burning plastic — is converted into carbon dioxide and water.
Hence, the final emission is clean and this is the standard adopted by incineration plants in Singapore and advanced countries, such as Switzerland and Germany.
In the case of Singapore, it will soon launch its fifth WTE plant, which will be integrated with a water management plant.
Building this new plant will enable older, less efficient plants to be replaced and help reduce the carbon footprint — burning the same amount of waste can produce double the amount of energy.
The reason why the republic co-located the new plant in Tuas with the water management facility is the synergy obtained when these plants are combined for better efficiency and resource recovery.
Food waste can also be co-digested with sludge from wastewater. That will help increase the amount of biogas produced, and in turn, the amount of electricity generated.
With all these advantages and pay-offs in the form of power generation, re-using the incinerator ash for making construction materials and integrating water management with WTE will make the cost factor less compelling.
What's more, an incinerator works 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 365 days a year, rain or shine, which means on a daily basis, much of the waste is drastically reduced — 90 per cent with a 10 per cent ash residual.
Already a Malaysian inventor is reported to have devised a smaller incinerator suitable for managing municipal waste, in which it features a solar-powered incinerator that is able to treat the flue gas and, at the same time, convert the ash into organic fertiliser by merely adding sawdust.
This fertiliser will come in handy for those involved in urban farming. The incinerator, dubbed as "The Asher", is being exported to China, Indonesia, the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates and Singapore.
Perhaps what is needed is a private-public partnership to build one incinerator in every state in Malaysia, which is actually in the pipeline, but is opposed by environmentalists for the sake of opposing.
If the cost is so hefty, such that we can't build a big plant to get the economies of scale like what Singapore is doing, then Malaysia can follow the Japanese model.
In adopting the WTE concept, Japan has built a few hundred small incineration plants, where each prefecture and municipality is responsible for its own waste disposal.
But, before we follow any one country on this, we have to assess our own unique scenario by looking at our own waste landscape, and borrow the model that best suits our unique circumstances.
JAMARI MOHTAR
Director of media & communications
EMIR Research, Kuala Lumpur
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times