Another Man’s Trash...
Three major players in the waste management industry airs out the dirty laundry of cleaning up after humanity’s mess
The heart of the matter is that we’ve grown complacent, and that we’ve somehow overlooked the inevitable consequences of a growing global consumption that has been left unchecked. The problem with waste persists despite numerous efforts, and it’s still growing.
According to a news article written by The Star on July 30, 2019 entitled “Generating more waste than ever”, Swcorp’s deputy chief executive officer Dr Mohd Pauze Mohamad Tara revealed that in 2018 alone, Malaysians have already generated a “whopping 38,142 tonnes of waste per day, an increase from 19,000 tonnes of waste a day in 2005” and observes that more than half of that waste was simply sent to sanitary landfills, despite 40 per cent of it being recyclable—and according to a 2020 report on global waste management by the World Bank Group, solid waste management alone has added to an approximate of 1.6 billion carbon dioxide equivalent of greenhouse gas emissions.
So, how does the accumulation of poorly managed waste affect us as a whole? And more importantly, why does it matter? We ask three major players in the waste management industry about what it means to clean up after humanity’s mess, and turn what once was considered as scrap into gold.
IHANDAL
Aaron Patel, CEO of ihandal
“When we talk about green energy, there are two things: how you generate that energy and how you use it,” Aaron Patel explains. “At ihandal, we’re in the business of the latter—which is how to use energy more efficiently.”
Having founded the company in 2009 during his final year in high school, Patel has since changed what used to be a solar hot water panel trading business into the regional turnkey engineering contractor it is today.
Dealing with the business of recovering and reutilising waste heat (also known as the latent thermal energy left behind by engines and various machinery), ihandal has provided energy-efficient solutions for over 90 properties in the Southeast Asian region, which includes Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines and Sri Lanka.
“The thing is, this technology isn’t necessarily something new,” the 29-year-old CEO clarifies. “Industrial sectors are already doing it. Take coal power plants for example, they use the steam generated from boiling water to power the engines that conduct electricity. That’s a lot of high temperature waste heat they’re able to utilise.
“But for ihandal, we focus on the warm air you usually find in smaller, compact spaces like basement car parks, air conditioning systems and even ceiling spaces.”
Which, Patel further adds, is a challenge in itself. “We work with medium temperatures that go only as high as 40 degrees, which by itself isn’t going to do much unless we concentrate it and raise it back up to boiling levels. We make that heat useful again, otherwise it’ll just be thrown away.”
Another challenge, he notes, is the hesitance among investors as they perceive it as a high cost fix that may or may not work in the long run, regardless of its cost efficient out-turn and ihandal’s successful track record. “Not everyone looks at the bigger picture,” Patel laments. “People know it’s a waste, but they ultimately look at the payback. If it costs money and has no returns by a certain amount of time, there’s no point in investing.”
He also comments about society’s unconcerned behaviour towards wasteful consumption and attributes it to them not understanding the full value of such waste. “If you don’t value it or feel like it doesn’t negatively affect your financials, you won’t care about it because it doesn’t hurt you. But when it becomes expensive, you start being efficient.”
But recently, he sees a shift in gears. As companies received little to no revenue over the months of being under lockdown, they began to contact ihandal for cost and energy efficient solutions.
He says, “The big goal at ihandal is this: to save 200 million tonnes of CO2 emissions annually over the next decade. But for now, I’ll settle for two million.”
“If you don’t value it or feel like it doesn’t negatively affect your financials, you won’t care about it because it doesn’t hurt you. But when it becomes expensive, you start being efficient”
KLOTH CARES
Sarah Kedah and Nik Suzila, Co-founders of Kloth Cares
According to a report done by Kloth Cares in 2019, an estimated 2,000 tonnes of fabric waste (an approximate of 12 million T-shirts) is disposed per day in Malaysia, and that 700 tonnes of it have been collected by Kloth Cares. It’s a frighteningly huge number—and if that hasn’t sunk in just yet, imagine a factory located in Port Klang the size of four football fields, filled to its maximum capacity with only enough space for a narrow walkway that could barely fit one person. This factory, Life Line Clothing, is the business partner of Kloth Cares.
“The lockdown was a crazy few months for us,” Life Line Clothing’s manager Zaki Suratman says. “With ports closed off and exports at a standstill, our factory was jam-packed with mountains of waist-high boxes of clothing because despite ceasing our operations, we still had to collect the clothes that have been dropped off at our bins.”
Compounded with insufficient recycling solutions for fabrics and the lack of technology, recycling plants across the world can barely keep up with the high demands of consumers that follow rapidly shifting fashion trends.
“We produce more than 100 billion pieces of unwanted
garments annually at a global scale,” Nik Suzila shares. “And according to reports done by the United Nations as well as our government, more than 85 per cent of those unwanted garments are actually sent to landfills worldwide. And less than 1 per cent of these unwanted fabrics aren’t recycled from fibre to fibre (meaning from one T-shirt to another), because of the lack of technology.”
The crux of the problem is ultimately our linear economy where we take, make and dispose garments or textile wastes that we deem unusable.
With the fashion industry being one of the largest perpetrators of environmental pollution, Sarah Kedah thinks that to truly shake things up, one needed to go beyond recycling. “I think that to tackle the issue of overconsumption, we need to do more than just recycle textiles,” she states. “People need to be more informed about what they wear, where it’s produced and how long it takes to decompose if they’re sent to landfills. This helps garment producers, as well as fashion designers to better identify sustainable materials and create designs that can provide us solutions for reutilisation and produce less fabric waste instead.”
“We produce more than 100 billion pieces of unwanted garments annually at a global scale. And according to reports done by the United Nations as well as our government, more than 85 per cent of those unwanted garments are actually sent to landfills”
BIJI-BIJI
Juliana Adam, CEO of Biji-biji Initiative
The problem with plastics is a long-standing one, and it’s a topic widely discussed since the 1960s when Americans started noticing plastic debris appearing in oceans. Today, it’s become a global crisis. And should our ‘throwaway culture’ continue at such a breakneck speed, where 8 million tonnes of plastics are left to float away at sea— the equivalent of dumping one garbage truck’s worth of contents per every minute—this very estimate calculated by the World Economic Forum in 2016 may well increase to two per minute and can go up to four per minute in 2030. And by 2050, according to Dame Ellen Mcarthur, a retired English sailor who’s seen more than her fair share of what makes up 70 per cent of our planet’s surface, we’ll be living in a world where there are more plastics than fish (by weight).
For Juliana Adam, it’s an impending reality that most Malaysians aren’t even conscious of despite the growing awareness about what plastic pollution means for their future. “I think one of the key factors as to why the problem persists is that we’re still very much dependent on it,” she states. “Most of us consume single-use plastics with a lackadaisical mindset. I’ve met people who think that there’s no harm in using plastic straws because they’re just one person, which baffles me because what about the other 32 million Malaysians then? That’s 32 million straws a day!”
She stresses that the ‘enemy’ in particular isn’t so much as plastics but rather consumer behaviour, and concedes that it’s largely attributed to the lack of infrastructure support as well as proper education on recycling.
“Our recycling systems are still at a stage of infancy,” Juliana explains. “We lack the proper access to recycling facilities, collection points, and nor do we have complete, implementable knowledge on sustainable lifestyles.”
She also shares that by educating the public on the proper management of plastic, it creates a circular economy for plastics as well, where instead of perceiving it as ‘waste’, they see it as a valuable resource that can be preserved and enhanced for multiple usage, which allows for the preservation of our natural environment.
Juliana conceded, however, that a plastic-free future may be far-off due to our everyday items being made of the stuff. “The thing is, it’s what we do with plastics that matter. I feel like there’s a lack of respect for this place we call our home. We always want more, and while it’s okay to want to better our lives, we need to be more conscientious of our resources, like where it’s coming from and what impact it’ll have on the environment.”
“I feel like there’s a lack of respect for this place we call our home. We always want more, and while it’s okay to want to better our lives, we need to be more conscientious of our resources, like where it’s coming from and what impact it’ll have on the environment”