Visit To Landfill

All thanks to Jaron's offer, I got a free ride to a landfill. The landfill's capacity is only for one area itself, and yet the amount of waste is too heavy-laden with waste from just a single location. This landfill has short lifespan in which the manager said it could only sustain for about next 10 months. Imagine that. After 10 months, another land would have to be excavated to bury our daily rubbish. 

Bulky waste - sofa, cabinet, etc - what would be the better solution to dispose it aside from landfilling?

The deep excavated land

The greyish sheet on top of the land is wastewater residue from paper mill factories. 

This is the water monitoring well which is layered with 10mm thick geotextile membrane which prevents leachate from seeping into the soil.

We also grabbed the opportunity to visit Malaysia's only Refuse-Derived Fuel Plant which was located a stone's throw away.

The rubbish is being shredded prior to sorting - which is the largest mistake in this RDF Plant.

Rubbish being compressed and stacked

This is the ash residue after  incineration.

Next, I had an opportunity to visit Setia City Mall too, a newly established shopping mall which is eco-friendly in many way. First, some of the building's wall is made of glass instead of the typical concrete because it allows natural sunlight to pour and thus reducing usage of electrical lighting and energy consumption. This same goes to the carpark in which it is not fully enclosed or built underground to enable sunlight to brighten the parking lot. Next, it also established rainwater harvest system. In addition, the eye-soothing recycle bin is also ubiquitous in the shopping mall. Though I am skeptic on the correct usage from the public, but at least Setia City Mall does a good job to create awareness compared to sky-scrapping shopping mall - KLCC, Times Square, Pavilion etc. What's the point of being the most strategic mall but it is not doing Mother Nature any good? The next good thing about Setia is that it engages the tenants in whole. They make all tenants segregate plastic and paper for recycling purpose. As for waste other than paper and plastic, it is dumped into a compactor. It uses hauled-container system in which once the compactor is full of rubbish, the whole compactor will be hauled for disposal and return after that with an empty compactor.

Below are some pictures on how TopWaste - a recyclable collection company - collects cardboard.

Here comes the truck

From the store, all the cardboard has been nicely arranged into bundles. Each with 40 kg.

The workers would have to weigh it first.

Then, unload it into the truck - nicely arranged.

The final stack up effort

Not forgetting the plastic too

Great visit of the day =)