MSW TREATMENT BY INCINERATION IS NOT RELEVANT

FOR MALAYSIA

PROPONENT TEAM

1. Incineration technology is not climate-friendly.

The incineration of municipal waste involves the generation of climate-relevant emissions.
These are mainly emissions of carbon dioxide as well as nitrous oxide, oxides of nitrogen
(NOx), ammonia and organic carbon that is measured as total carbon.
Carbon dioxide
Carbon dioxide constitutes the chief climate-relevant emission of waste
incineration and is considerably higher.
The climate-relevant carbon dioxide emissions from waste incineration are
determined by the proportion of waste whose carbon compounds are assumed to
be of fossil origin.
Although this carbon dioxide is directly released into the atmosphere and thus
makes a real contribution to the greenhouse effect, only the climate-relevant
carbon dioxide emissions from fossil sources are considered for the purposes of a
global analysis.
Oxides of nitrogen (NOx)
In MSW incinerators, nitrogen oxides (NOx) which are formed essentially from the
nitrogen contained in the waste, from the combustion process itself and from
spontaneous reaction will be emitted along with the fly ash.
Ammonia
In MSW combustion, emissions of ammonia arise in particular from the use of
ammonia as an additive in waste gas treatment measures for nitrogen removal.
Carbon monoxide
During the incineration of municipal waste in MSW incinerators, carbon monoxide
is formed as the product of incomplete combustion.
Carbon monoxide is an indicator substance for the combustion process and an
important quality criterion for the level of combustion of the gases.
2. Incineration is not pollution-free.
Incineration facilities emit particulate matter, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), heavy
metals, dioxins, sulphur dioxide, mercury and furans.
Many of these chemicals are known to be persistent or very resistant to degradation in
the environment, bioaccumulative which may build up in the tissues of living organisms
and toxic. These three properties make them arguably the most problematic chemicals
to human health and the environment.
In particular, plastics and metals are the major source of the calorific value of the waste.
The combustion of plastics, like polyvinyl chloride (PVC) gives rise to these highly toxic
pollutants.
Some of the emitted chemicals are carcinogenic (cancer-causing) and some are
endocrine disruptors.
Studies conducted on the workers at incineration facilities showed the increase in death
rates from cancer of the stomach, lungs and esophagus as well as from ischemic heart
disease.
Main example of an emerging threat is nanoparticle emissions from incinerators. These
ultrafine particles are not captured through air pollution control measures and may
contribute to between three and six percent of deaths in large urban areas in Europe.

3. Incineration is a waste of energy.

In fact, incineration facilities do produce energy from waste, but recycling is a far more
effective form of recovering energy from our discarded products.
Recycling conserves an average of three to five times more energy than using
incinerators because manufacturing new products from recycled materials uses much
less energy than making products from virgin raw materials.
This means that waste incinerators are effectively burning three to five units of energy to
make one unit, which is nothing short of a waste of energy.

4. Incinerators are extremely difficult to site.

Siting incineration facilities has been an enormous challenge over the past two decades
and will only grow more challenging in the future.
Many existing incineration plants were sited in low-income urban areas alongside other
toxin-producing facilities, contributing to a great number of cases of environmental
injustice.
 Experiences in Europe and UK have shown the tendering, planning and permitting
processes for thermal treatment facilities such as incinerators can take up to ten years .

5. Incinerators are not financially competitive.

Tipping fees are the fees paid by haulers to dump large amounts of discarded materials
in landfills or incinerators. Tip fees are also paid at composting facilities and can be paid
at some recycling facilities, though most recycling facilities pay haulers for their materials.
Tip fees at incinerators are consistently 50% higher than those at landfills. The average
landfill tipping fee in the U.S. is $44 per ton while the average incinerator tipping fee is
nearly $67 per ton.
Incinerator tip fees have been substantially higher than landfill tip fees since the late
1980s. This trend shows no signs of changing course.
For most communities, an incinerator is simply a costly investment that raises the costs of
discard management, impose financial risks and endanger the community and
environmental health.
The capital costs to build an incinerator average $200,000 per daily ton of capacity.

6. It uses high cost of operation due to the high moisture content of the waste. It is due
to the high percentage (46.95% in 2013) of organic material in the Malaysian MSW.
7. We have poor technical-expertise in the incineration technology in order to maintain
the incinerators in future. Hence, the worker must undergo a training session and also
usually paid more than employees at a landfill.
8. Incinerators consume high fuel causing the cost to be increased eventually compared
to the landfilling method.
9. For the time being, there available technology is unsuitable for incineration of the local
wastes.
10. There is also protest by the local residents and non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) where they claimed it involved health risks. This is due to the emissions of
toxic organic compounds and metals from stack, complications caused by disposal or
inorganic residue and difficulty of monitoring facilities after the preliminary test burns
11. The emission standard in Malaysia is stricter on the incineration compared to other
combustion devices.
12. Incineration also dissipates the zero waste practices such as recycling and composting
among the Malaysians. This will then lessen the materials efficiency and the conserve
energy spent on resource extraction and process.
13. The air pollution control facilities cost is very high up to one half of the cost of the
plant.
Malaysia Must Say No to Incinerator

1. Waste incinerators are toxic to public health, harmful to the economy, environment and
climate, and undermine composting, recycling and waste reduction programmes.
2. Incinerating these discards entails destroying billions of ringgits worth of precious materials
from a finite resource base that could be recycled into the economy.
3. Even the most technologically advanced incinerators release thousands of pollutants that
contaminate our air, soil and water.
4. Incinerating municipal solid waste in actual fact converts discarded materials into a variety of
waste products, including bottom ash, fly ash, combustion gases air pollutants, wastewater,
wastewater sludge and heat.
5. Emissions from incinerators include particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, heavy
metals, dioxins, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, mercury, carbon dioxide and furans. Even
small amounts of some of these toxins can be harmful to human health and the environment.
The toxic impacts of incineration are far reaching: persistent organic pollutants (POPs) such
as dioxins and furans travel thousands of miles and accumulate in animals and humans.
6. Many of these pollutants enter the food supply and concentrate up through the food chain.
Incinerator workers and people living near incinerators are particularly at high risk of exposure
to these contaminants. Contaminants are also distributed when food produced near
incinerators is shipped to other communities.
7. The incinerator industry claims that air pollution control devices such as air filters can capture
and concentrate some of the pollutants. But, an important factor to be considered is that they
do not eliminate these pollutants. By capturing and concentrating the pollutants, pollutants are
transferred to other environmental media such as fly ash, char, slag, and waste water.
8. Modern pollution control devices such as baghouse filters do not prevent the escape of
hazardous emissions such as ultra-fine particles. Ultra-fine particles, or nano-particles, are
too small to be effectively captured, and can penetrate deep into the lungs.
9. Cancer, birth defects, reproductive dysfunction, neurological damage and other health effects
are known to occur at very low exposures to many of the metals, organochlorines and other
pollutants released by incineration facilities. Increased cancer rates, respiratory ailments,
reproductive abnormalities and other health effects are noted among people living near some
incinerators, according to scientific studies and surveys by community groups.
10. Emissions limits for incinerators as stipulated in our environmental regulations do not ensure
safety. These emissions standards tend not to be based on what is scientifically safe for
public
 health, but on what are determined to be technologically feasible for a given source of
pollution. How do we clearly define a safe level of exposure to cancer-causing pollutants?
11. Besides this, standards only regulate a handful of the thousands of known pollutants, and do
not take into account the exposure to multiple chemicals at the same time. These synergistic
impacts have countless harmful effects on health and the environment. In addition, emissions
from incinerators are not measured sufficiently and thus overall emissions levels reported can
be misleading.
12. There are many evidences of harmful impacts of incineration but these are being ignored.
Incineration also undermines zero waste practices such as recycling and composting, which
close the loop on materials efficiency and conserve energy spent on resource extraction and
processing. The reason is peoples efforts to avoid waste production are minimized when
they know that that their waste is burnt in an incineration plant.
13. From the economy perspective, the air pollution controls required in incineration plants are
extremely expensive. Very often up to one half of the costs of a plant are due to air pollution
control facilities. As the laws can change and maybe require updates in the air pollution
controls this could lead to much higher costs in the future.
Common Drawbacks of Incineration Technique

1. Incineration is not sustainable. We have to keep the nature of the earth and recycle
everything we possibly can. If we keep eliminate all the waste without making any efforts to
recycle it, it will affect the nature. For examples like papers, it was made up from tree. If more
trees are cut down to make paper, this will cause global warming. In addition, 3 to 4 times
energy is save by recycling the same materials as burned. One European company estimates
that a combination of recycling and composting reduces global warming gases 46 times more
than incineration generating electricity (AEA, 2001)

2. Incineration is high cost. The social costs of incineration are staggering especially in
developing countries. The huge amount of money spent on incineration goes into complicated
machinery (over half the capital cost is needed for air pollution control) and most of it leaves
the country in the pockets of the multinational companies that build these monsters. With the
alternatives most of the money goes into creating local jobs and local businesses, thereby
staying in the community and the country. In Brescia, Italy, they spent about $400,000,000
building an incinerator and have created just 80 full-time jobs. While Nova Scotia, a province
of Canada, after rejecting an incinerator, has created over 3000 jobs in the handling of the
discarded resources and in the industries using these secondary materials.

3. Incineration produce harmful gases. For every four tons of trash burned you get at least
one ton of ash: 90% is called bottom ash (that is the ash collected under the furnace) and
10% is the very toxic fly ash. Burning household trash we make the most toxic substances
that we have ever been able to make in a chemical laboratory: polyhalogenated dibenzo para
dioxins and furans (PCDDs, PCDFs, PBDDs, and PBDFs etc) called "dioxins" for short.
There are literally thousands of these substances. There is no question that over 25
years the industry has got better at capturing these pollutants but we are still hostage as to
how well the plants are designed and operated, monitored and the regulations enforced. In
addition to this, incineration releases many toxic metals from otherwise fairly stable
matrices. At worst these metals (lead, cadmium, mercury, chromium etc) go into the air, at
best they are captured in the fly ash in the air pollution control devices (APC). But it is a
truism to state that the better the APC the more toxic the ash becomes. Where is this ash
going to go? In Germany and Switzerland, the fly ash is put into nylon bags and deposited
in salt mines. In Japan a number of the incinerators vitrify the ash, making it into a glass-
like material, but that takes a huge amount of energy away from the system.
4. Against regulations. Health Protection Agency says well-managed incinerators dont
have an impact on public health? Doctors and scientists contest this claim. And what if an
incinerator is not well managed? Accidents and breaches occur at many modern incineration
plants. In 2006-2007 English incinerators broke the law almost 1400 times. The
Environmental Agency can no more assure us of safe operation than the police can as sure
us of zero crime. Recent breaches at modern incinerators include the Isle of Wight,
Nottingham, Swansea, Stoke, Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Bolton, Sheffield, Grimsby,
TeesValley, Dundee, Dumfries, Swansea and Coventry. For example, a Freedom of
Information Act response shows the modern Dumfries energy-from-waste plant has
breached its permit for carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides, VOCs, and ammonia emissions;
and also for non-reporting, late reporting, insufficient reporting and its failure to adequately
control waste. It only started operation in October 2009, but the local press report 172
emission breaches in this short period.

5. Job Creation Opportunities Missed. Weve been told over and over again that this will
create 40 full time jobs. Alternative recycling technologies create more jobs.
T he Arising Issue s of Building Incine rator Plants in Malaysia

In Malaysia the issue of building incinerator plants always becomes a national front pages
news as many Non-Profit Organisation (NGO) will always oppose the idea because of its
environmental effect to the people and not economical as well. The incineration plant
proposed to be built at Kampong Bohol; Mukin in Sungai Besi Kuala Lumpur sometimes ago was
strongly rejected by the people (CAP and Alam Sabahat, 2000).

A little brief on existing small incinerators plants in Malaysia, as at today Malaysia

has incinerators built at Pulau Pangkor which begun operation on 19th March 2002. Other 5 units
of small-scale incinerators of rotary kiln type were built in five tourism spots, which are Pulau
Langkawi, Pulau Pangkor, Pulau Tioman, Pulau Labuan, and Cameron Highlands. All these
incinerators have no energy recoveryexcept in Pulau Langkawi, capable of generating even
one MW of electricity . The primary purpose of building all these incinerators were to reduce
waste going to landfill which has been the traditional disposing method for long time. All these
small incinerators had failed due to faulty design, improper operation, poor maintenance
and high diesel usage and waste characteristics, due to high moisture content of 60% to
70%. They were all designed for western characteristic of waste which is quite different from
Malaysia environment

Yet, despite these failures in smaller incinerators built to reduce waste, it was
recently announced by Minister of Housing and Local Government (MHLG), Dato Wira Chor
Chee Heung that the Malaysia Federal Government, through the National Solid Waste
Management Department (NSWMD) is planning to introduce the first ever mass -scale
incinerator facility with capacity of 800-1000 ton of municipal solid waste (MSW) per day in Kuala
Lumpur (Keng Zi Xiang, 2012). This means the ministry is losing faith to intensify its effort through
the integrated waste management of the 3R reduce, reused, recycle which has drastically helped
in reducing waste in developed countries. Recent studies have shown that incineration is
not the most favourable waste management option in this 21st century. The
interesting thing these days in incineration is the peoples perceive fear about the pollutants
released and those captured in the residues, as well as incinerators high economic
costs, when made visible, have dramatically slowed down the building of these facilities in
both northern and southern alike. If one avoids the beguiling but inaccurate label
waste-to-energy one could see that these facilities do not belong to the future in which
sustainability has become the key issue in environmental matters (Connet, 2002). The table
1 below is the incineration situations in developed countries.
 Malaysia could not maintain the smaller incinerators built in some of the Islands
due to poor maintenance, high consumption of fuel and smaller quantities of waste
generated. How then could this bigger incinerator be maintained? We should always learn from
past experiences and this is one. Malaysia could find herself in the position of spending Millions
of Ringgit of the Rakyan for a white elephant project that will not stand the test of time. There is
need to have a re think on the part of policy makers as incinerator has no business in this century
that sustainable development has become like a popular song in every issue regarding
environment and economic development.

The benefits of recycling and composting of waste are multidimensional. Recycling of

waste from the municipal solid waste rather than burning it in an incinerator can
result in significantly less resources used in manufacturing. Less energy is expended
in creating finished products, less water and air pollution from manufacturing and less land
allocated for landfills. Waste recycling can reduce waste disposal cost for local authorities, as
many local authorities in Malaysia spent 60-70% of their annual budget on waste disposal,
thereby extending the life span of landfills (Ko chi Wai 2007). This will help the local authorities
in reducing the need to invest in transport vehicles and equipment, reducing vehicle operation
and maintenance cost, reducing fuel consumption for transporting waste (Habitat, 1998). The
organic waste could be composed and used to enhance the fertility of soil, thereby
boasting high agriculture yields for the local communities.

However, incinerators emit varying levels of heavy metals such as vanadium,

manganese, chromium, nickel, arsenic, mercury, lead and cadmium. Many of these pollutants
are carcinogenic and threaten public health even at very low levels. Many of these
pollutants also enter the food supply and concentrate up through the food chain. In
addition, incinerator workers and people living near incinerators are particularly at high risk
of exposure to these contaminants. Increased cancer rates, respiratory ailments, reproductive
abnormalities and other health effects are noted among people living near some incinerators,
according to scientific studies and surveys by community groups. Contaminants are also
distributed when food produced near incinerators is shipped to other communities.

Although the process of incineration is simple, the machinery that drives the
process is not. If something goes wrong with the incinerator and maintenance is required,
repairs can become verycostly. Finally, from the economy perspective, the air pollution controls
required in incineration plants are extremely expensive. Very often up to one half of the costs of
a plant are due to air pollution control facilities. As the laws can change and maybe require
updates in the air pollution controls this could lead to much higher costs in the future.
Why Incineration is Irrele vant in Malaysia?

Economy crisis in Malaysia

The incinerator is very costly. In term of maintenance a lot of money need to be used. Average
construction cost of an incinerator: USD525,000-650,000 per ton. It is equal to RM2860032.50
for incinerators around 3 million is required. This is only for construction. The maintenance cost
need to be considered as well. This is because the incinerators is about combustion reaction.
Without proper handling it may leads to explosion.

Impact: GST% might arises. This will cause people in Malaysia feel more pressurized on
current situation. There are a lot of benefits of incinerators and it cant be denied. However,
current situation in our country in term of economy is not suitable for using incinerators. Malaysia
will put blame on government when taxes is increases. Government realizes economy crisis in
Malaysia and wanted to reduce burden on Malaysia. That is why incinerator is not relevant in
Malaysia.

Habits and mentality people in Malaysia

Impact: The incinerator only allowed people to be more lazy and irresponsible. Incinerators
burn out 90% of waste. However, the waste problem would not solve as habits and attitude of
Malaysian who are selfish and ignorant. Waste generated per day will continue arises. Current
problem in Malaysia is too many waste generated per day and this problem can be solved when
Malaysian having awareness on waste problem. Malaysian attitude need to be changed instead
of using costly incinerators. As compared with japan, they are highly dependent on incinerators
but their attitude on recycling, reuse and reduce should be respected. We as Malaysian should
practices these habits also.

Landfill

Insufficient on landfill is a result on attitude of Malaysian. Waste generated per day continue
increases because ignorant attitude of Malaysian. Landfill is one of economic ways for waste
management and there are still lack in system management that leads to other problems as well.
Instead of using costly incinerators why dont we focused on landfill improvement system. This
will reduce the cost and reduce the burden on Malaysian.