Sanitary Landfills: Toward Sustainable Development - lumes

LUMES 2000-2001
Sanitary Landfills: Toward Sustainable Development
1 Introduction
Solid waste is the by-product of human activities, as long as there is production and consumption,
residual material will be generated. These residual materials can be reused, recycled or reclaimed
for energy and nutrients. Otherwise these elements will ultimately be released to the environment
either to the sea, the land or the atmosphere. The environment has the capacity to dissolve these
residual materials and transforms them into harmless materials or nutrients over a period of time.
But when the waste amount outstrips the ability of the environment to assimilate, it will pose
hazard to the environment as well as human. The current approaches to solid waste management
by large are unsustainable.
In the publication, Our Common Future (1987) which is more well known as Brundtland Report
defined sustainable development as “to ensure that it (development) meets the needs of the
present without compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their own needs”. The
failure of the authorities in recognising the need to protect the human health, natural resources
and the environment would result in discarding solid waste in uncontrolled disposal method or
without prior resources recovery treatment. This would lead to loss of natural resources especially
non-renewable resources and leave environmental problems for the future generation to deal with.
Thus, an environmentally sound waste management should be implemented to reuse, recycle and
reclaim the resources from depleting in order to ensure that we are not consuming what should be
left for the future generations and also to minimise the contamination and effects of the solid
waste to the environment.
1.1 Problem Definition
It has been observed that the solid waste generation in Malaysia has increased concurrent with the
development of the country. For the past 20 years, Malaysia has undergone an economic growth
with the rate of 5.2% (World Development Indicators database, 2001) (Agamuthu, 2001). While
at the same time, solid waste has showed a stable growth with the economic development of the
country with the rate of 1.5% per year (DUCED, 2001). The solid waste generated per capital has
increased from 0.5kg/capital/day in the 1980´s to current volume of 1kg/capital/day. This
represents a 200% increased in 20 years (Agamuthu, 2001). Such a great increase in the
municipal solid waste is mainly due to the urbanisation process, increase in population, increase
in per capital income and changes in consumption patterns. These factors have not only increased
the solid waste volume but also changed the characteristics of the solid waste which have made it
more complex for the municipalities to handle.
The current municipal solid waste management in Malaysia is far from sufficient and efficient in
handling the increased amount of solid waste and its different composition due to lack of funds
and expertise. Most of the municipalities are lack of adequate funds for waste treatment and
disposal. About 40% to 70% of the service budget of the municipalities and district councils have
been used for solid waste management (MHLGM, 2001). But this is barely enough to conduct a
sound and efficient waste management system and almost all waste is ended up at the landfill
without pre-treatment.
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