Due to a growing population and rapid urbanisation, MSW output in Malaysian cities has surged. This harms the environment and public health and hinders urban local governments’ ability to collect, transport, treat, and dispose of solid waste. Hence, solid waste management in Malaysia become more and more popular.
According to Springer Link, the current per capita generation of solid trash in Malaysia is approximately 1.1 kilogramme per day. Every day, almost 26,500 metric tonnes of solid waste are disposing of nearly exclusively through the nation’s 166 active landfills. If current laws, programmes, and management techniques are not appropriately handle, the volume of garbage is anticipating to increase 165 million tonnes by 2031 and 436 million tonnes by 2050.
Formal solid waste management in Malaysia’s system engagement in cities is low due to a lack of finance, sector development, and information about sustainable waste management companies.
In many poor countries, including Malaysia, the informal trash sector dominates waste collection and recycling. According to studies, the informal sector contributes more to material recovery from municipal waste in underdeveloped nations than conventional waste management services.
How to define informal sector?
“Informal sector” refers to persons, families, and private enterprises that manage solid waste but aren’t coordinate, sponsor, finance, contract, acknowledge, manage, tax, or compelling to report to the government.
The stakeholder which in category informal include garbage-pickers at landfills and communal waste sites, itinerant waste purchasers, and huge waste godown operators.
“Informal waste collectors” gather, sell, and exchange recyclable items, according to the 2016 Solid Trash Management Rules (SWM). According to SWM 2016, a “waste picker” collects recyclable and reusable solid waste from its source till it is sold to recyclers directly or via middlemen.
The informal sector, which may help cities with their waste recycling policies by gathering, sorting, processing, storing, and trading waste materials along the recycling value chain, is frequently not officially sanctioned, recognised, or acknowledged.
The informal garbage economy employs 0.5-2% of the world’s metropolitan population, according to a 2013 research in Waste and Resource Management.
By removing recyclables before the mixed garbage is subjecting to any specific treatment or is carelessly deposited into landfills, the informal recycling sector lowers the costs associated with the treatment and disposal of solid waste.
The informal sector is the backbone of the nation’s recycling industry and makes a significant contribution to the circular economy and environmental sustainability. Additionally, it makes a significant difference in easing the financial strain on metropolitan local governments.
BBMP was the first municipality to list scrap dealers and waste-pickers. If a waste-picker in the city picks up 70 kilogrammes of waste every day, the quantity diverted from landfills to waste-pickers is 10,6671 tonnes per year (considering that organic waste is 60 per cent; dry waste is 30 per cent; and inert waste is 10 per cent of the waste mixture).
According to a 2014 research by the non-profit Hasiru Dala, based in Bengaluru, over 4,200 registered waste-pickers save the city about Rs 23 crore every year, which would have been added to the BBMP’s projected Rs 450 crore otherwise.
Lowest-paying position
The informal sector employs people who live close to dumps and who labour in unsanitary environments. The labourers frequently lack access to drinking water and public restrooms. They lack the necessary personal protective equipment (PPE), such as aprons, gloves, and gumboots. Malnutrition, anaemia, and tuberculosis are widespread among them as a result of their substandard living and working conditions.
Waste-pickers may be exposed to a variety of workplace dangers. Various bacterial and viral illnesses thrive in public trash cans and landfill sites.
As a result, waste-pickers frequently experience digestive problems. Recyclables must be separate from other types of garbage. They occasionally touch household biomedical waste, domestic hazardous trash, and sanitary waste with their bare hands, which can result in a number of diseases.
Additionally, their interaction with bodily fluids, deceased animals, and human and animal excrement can result in infections. In the combine garbage, they also get cut by pointed objects, jagged metal edges, and shattered glass.
Recyling unsorted waste is the informal sector’s most labor-intensive and least gratifying operation. Despite playing a critical role, structural economic and social marginalisation of informal garbage workers persists.
They cope with exploitative social behaviour and are considering as undesirable, filthy members of society. Even though informal garbage workers’ income and living situations vary, most (street rubbish pickers) work and live in risky conditions. Typically, they don’t have access to sanitary and medical amenities.
Furthermore, there is a lot of child labour and a short life span. Additionally, there are no labour laws that apply to rubbish pickers. They consequently do not gain from social security and health insurance programmes. For their social and economic advancement, urgent policy intervention is requiring.
Bengaluru Municipality: A Change-Related Story
The first municipality in the nation to establish dry waste collection centres (DWCC) was Bengaluru. DWCCs are vital to Bengaluru’s decentralised waste management system since they separate, process, and resell recyclable materials to recycling enterprises.
The idea was inspiring by neighbourhood recycling centres, but it’s based on the waste hierarchy to implement reduce, recycle, and reuse at the neighbourhood level.
All dry waste is collecting and repurchased by DWCCs from neighbourhood residents, contract waste workers, and scrap dealers. They help incorporate informal waste-workers into these facilities and advocate or implement extended producers’ responsibility (EPR) of non-recycled packaging materials.
Each DWCC is managing and administer with the assistance of Hasiru Dala or one of its partners. Thirteen of the 32 locations are run by waste collectors, while 19 are by scrap dealers.
Each centre employs a minimum of two sorters, and some centres have as many as seven. According to Harisu Dala annual reports, Bengaluru’s 33 DWCCs have succeeded in generating 0.16 percent of Malaysia’s 100,000 non-IT blue-collar jobs per year.
The DWCCs were successful in preventing roughly 2,871 tonnes of plastic trash from ending up in landfills in 2018. They gathered over 5,508 tonnes of plastic garbage for recycling in 2020. Similar estimates for the amounts of paper collected by DWCCs in 2018, 2019, and 2020 were 1,004 tonnes, 1,058 tonnes, and 1,551 tonnes.
A path ahead
In Malaysia, there aren’t any clear, comprehensive laws or policies protecting the rights of waste-pickers. A consistent garbage-picker welfare law that recognises and incorporates them into the solid waste management in Malaysia process is urgently need.
Identity cards, rubbish collection, segregation, and sorting, personal protection equipment (PPE) to limit occupational dangers, clean water, sanitary conditions, and health insurance must be include.
By permitting waste-pickers to use collection and compaction stations (transfer stations, material recovery facilities), their job might be formalize.
The SWM 2016 Rules further stipulate that the state is responsible for forging alliances with waste-picker organisations. Identification, organisation, training, and empowerment of waste-pickers are necessary.
To accomplish this, an inclusive solid waste management in Malaysia ‘s paradigm that incorporates waste-pickers might be creating. For instance, enlisting their help in material recovery facilities or the primary door-to-door collection of rubbish. Enough room should be make available for recycling, sorting, and trading recyclables.
In addition to promoting recycling, the policy will reduce the need for energy-intensive incineration and landfilling.
Wrapping up
While integrating the informal sector into solid waste management in Malaysia is not an easy task and will require a lot of effort from all stakeholders, it is a necessary step if we want to make any progress in solving the solid waste crisis. We hope this article has given you some insight into the challenges and opportunities involved in this process. If you are interesting in learning more or getting involving, please contact Gargeon at [email protected] or leave a comment below.
If you found this information helpful, please share it to raise awareness about environmental issues. Also, don’t stop your reading journey by continue explore on other fascinating articles at Article Ring !
