JOHOR BARU: Johor should emulate other countries which have managed to control the use of plastic bags.Green Earth Society Johor president P. Sivakumar said many developed nations had done this and that local businesses and consumers must support the move for zero plastic usage as it was a good initiative.He said in certain countries, retailers were allowed to sell only reusable bags to consumers at a reasonable price as part of measures for zero plastic usage.“Affordable reusable bags will encourage more users to stop using plastic and bring their own bags when out shopping,” Sivakumar said in response to the Penang government’s move in asking businesses in the state to stop dis­pensing plastic bags on Mondays starting from next month.

The latest move is an expansion of Penang’s initiative towards zero plastic bag usage which began in July 2009 and has since widened to charges of 20sen per bag.Sivakumar hoped Johor government would discuss with stakeholders on how much to charge for a bag to discourage consumers from even buying them.“A grace period of three months should be given to all hypermarkets and supermarkets to sell only reusable bags to consumers,” he added.

New dumping ground Heaps of plastic waste piled two storeys high and packed in sacks at an industrial plot opposite Taman Sri Wang across the railway track in Sungai Petani, Kedah. — LO TERN CHERN/The Star

Unscrupulous plastic recyclers have resorted to devious means to continue their business in the dark. Garbage is being moved from areas of trouble and dumped elsewhere and it is being buried or burnt to give the impression that it is being dealt with. Instead, it’s creating a bigger problem.SUNGAI PETANI: Penang did not want them, so plastic waste processing factories have moved here.After a major crackdown “shooed away” illegal plastic waste processing facilities from Penang, many of them moved south, just 30 minutes from Butterworth.Checks revealed that industrial plots as large as 4ha and vacant warehouses have become processing facilities for plastic waste that needed to be sorted by quality and cut into bits before being recycled.

The Kedah government is on alert and has ordered the closure of several illegal factories.A few factories in the Sungai Petani Industrial Area had their gates sealed with yellow tape by local authorities.However, forklifts on the factory grounds could still be seen shifting large sacks of shredded plastic piled two storeys high.Kedah environment and climate change committee chairman Simon Ooi said so far, 14 illegal plastic waste factories in Sungai Petani had been ordered to cease all operations, but he was disappointed that some of them were still running.“We have stopped issuing new licences for recycling plastic, and more drastic action will be taken very soon.

PETALING JAYA: The government wants to make it mandatory for consumers to send certain unwanted electrical and electronic items to places licensed to handle e-waste.The proposed change in the law aims to reduce harm to the environment and public health when such waste is not disposed of properly.The proposed regulation covers televisions, air-conditioners, refrigerators, washing machines, personal computers and mobile phones.Most of these items are recycled in the informal sector, where those with little expertise and resources rip apart the appliances and devices and burn some components to extract materials that can be resold. All this is done with little thought for health and environmental effects.In a statement to The Star, the Department of Environment (DoE) said it realised the importance of tackling scheduled e-waste management issues in Malaysia.

“The DoE has drafted a specific law for the six controlled items.“In the draft regulation, these items generated from households, institutions, commercial and others are listed to be regulated,” it said.Asked if “regulated” means it would be the consumers’ responsibility to discard or send these items only to registered retailers, collectors, recycling facilities or recovery facilities, the DoE replied: “Yes.”It said these controlled items were currently handled by the informal sector such as house-to-house collectors, community bodies and non-governmental groups.“The specific legislative provisions to control the management mechanism of the items are important to ensure that they do not pollute the environment or cause any harm to human health,” it added.

In a press conference earlier today, Energy, Science, Technology, Environment and Climate Change (MESTECC) Minister Yeo Bee Yin said that 10 containers will be sent back immediately.She added that five containers have already been sent back to Spain.Mestecc will also be conducting an inspection on more than 50 containers of plastic waste which were smuggled in.Once the inspections are done, Yeo expects that a total of 3,000 tonnes of contaminated waste from 60 containers will be shipped back to their countries.Together with the Department of Environment (DoE), Yeo said that 10 inspections have been conducted on 123 containers to dateThese containers originated from countries that include the UK, the US, Japan, China, Spain, Canada, Australia, Netherlands, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Bangladesh, Norway, and France.

The operations were led by DoE together with Royal Malaysian Customs, The Royal Malaysian Police (PDRM), Port Klang Authority, National Solid Waste Management Department, and Westports Malaysia.In one such case uncovered through investigations, a recycling company in UK had exported 1,000 containers - amounting to 50,000 tonnes of waste - in the last two years alone."We have not only found this one company, we have found a few companies from different countries," Yeo said.Yeo added that the Ministry is compiling a list of these "so-called recycling companies" and will send the list of these names to their respective governments for further action and investigation.

GEORGE TOWN: Penang is facing serious water pollution issues, both on the island and the mainland. The sea off Teluk Bahang is said to be contaminated by heavy metals while in Nibong Tebal, the water at the Sungai Tengah river mouth is black, a problem fishermen there claim has been plaguing them for about 10 years.The situation in the north of the island looks far more serious. Weeks ago only a few fish were found dead. Now, fishes are dying by the thousands.This has deprived fish breeders of their source of income as thousands of ikan kerapu (grouper) are dying in fish cages.“We use to sell about 500kgs of fish at markets and restaurants during the Chinese New Year and about 100kgs at normal times,” said breeder Lim Suan Gian, 64, at his farm in Teluk Bahang.“However, we only managed to sell about 40 to 50kgs over the last two months as most of them ended up dead.

“We are baffled. The Fisheries Department took samples of the dead fish several times but as of today, there has been no indication of what caused the deaths,” Lim said, adding that he suffered losses of about RM130,000 since April.Another breeder, Ooi Hye Hin, 57, said he took up a RM300,000 loan from Agro Bank to buy fish fry and now cannot pay the RM3,000 monthly payments because of this.“Both Lim and I have made five police reports as we have no other income and are not be able to service our bank loans,” Ooi said.He said the dead fish at the farms would have to be thrown away while those that were still alive would remain in the cages.“We have stopped sending our fish supply to customers since April,” he added.

MELAKA: Jabatan Bomba dan Penyelamat Malaysia (JBPM) mengenal pasti 19 lokasi panas atau ‘hotspot’ sebagai kawasan berisiko tinggi berlaku kes lemas sepanjang cuti perayaan Aidilfitri ini.Ketua Pengarah JBPM, Datuk Mohammad Hamdan Wahid, berkata kebanyakan lokasi panas itu terletak di pantai timur seperti Air Terjun Sekayu, Terengganu; Pantai Nipah, Bachok; dan Muara Tok Bali, Pasir Puteh, Kelantan.“Kesemua 19 lokasi itu disenarai berdasarkan kekerapan berlakunya kejadian lemas melebihi lima orang dalam tempoh tiga tahun ini.“Tahun lalu sahaja, ada kira-kira 400 kematian direkodkan akibat lemas membabitkan aktiviti air di seluruh negara,” katanya pada sidang media pada Majlis Jalinan Mesra Ramadan 2019 di Balai Bomba dan Penyelamat Bukit Katil, di sini, malam tadi.

LETTER | Many Ipoh folk like me take our hills and forests for granted. We seldom stop to ‘stand and stare’, to take in the beauty of these majestic green sentinels that form the natural backdrop to our homes and city. We paid for this nonchalance when during the Chinese New Year break this year, a huge 10ha patch of forest was mysteriously shaved off Kledang Hill. Heavy machinery had been used to clear the hill slope, and oil palm seedlings planted. The swiftness with which all this happened was startling, but what was more shocking was that it had apparently escaped the notice of all the relevant enforcement bodies.When civil society demanded answers, the Perak state government and MB Inc, which owned part of the land, declared the clearing of the forest illegal and outside their knowledge. To date however, the culprit has not been brought to book despite police reports by the public.

Many other disturbing truths then began to emerge. Among others, we learnt with dismay that the state government itself had plans for a housing project on the Bukit Kledang hill slope even before this ‘illegal’ clearing was done.Is Perak so desperately short of flat land that we need to fell a forest on a hill slope to build houses? And housing for whom? It definitely can’t be for the B40 who face an acute shortage of affordable housing.Under pressure from an indignant public, the state government gave the assurance that they were abandoning the housing project, and that the slope will be reforested and restored to its former status.

KUALA LUMPUR, May 21 — Malaysia, which has become the dumping ground for the world’s plastic waste, will send back non-recyclable plastic scrap to the developed countries that sent it there, its environment minister said today.Malaysia last year became the leading alternative destination for plastic scrap after China banned imports of such waste, disrupting the flow of more than seven million tonnes of plastic scrap a year.Dozens of recycling factories cropped up in Malaysia, many without an operating licence, and residents complained of environmental damage.Most of the plastic scrap coming into the country is contaminated and low-quality plastic from developed countries that is non-recyclable.

Now Malaysia has begun sending back the waste to its country of origin, said Yeo Bee Yin, Malaysia’s minister of energy, technology, science, climate change and environment.“Developed countries must be responsible in what they send out,” Yeo told Reuters.She said some of the plastic scrap sent to Malaysia was in violation of the Basel Convention, a UN treaty on the trade of plastic waste and its disposal.Malaysia has already sent five containers of contaminated plastic waste that was smuggled into the country back to its source, Spain, she said. The minister did not identify the smugglers but said an investigation was ongoing.More non-recyclable plastic will be sent back to its source next week, she said.

PARIS: Scientists in the United States have detected the highest levels of planet-warming carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere since records began, sounding new alarm over the relentless rise of man-made greenhouse gas emissions..26The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, which has tracked atmospheric CO2 levels since the late 1950s, on Saturday morning detected 415.26 parts per million (ppm).It was also the first time on record that the observatory measured a daily baseline above 415 ppm.

The last time Earth’s atmosphere contained this much CO2 was more than three million years ago, when global sea levels were several metres higher and parts of Antarctica were blanketed in forest.“It shows that we are not on track with protecting the climate at all. The number keeps rising and it’s getting higher year after year,” Wolfgang Lucht, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), told AFP“This number needs to stabilise.”But far from stabilising, levels of CO2 – one of a trinity of greenhouse gases produced when fossil fuels are burnt – are climbing ever more rapidly.Ralph Keeling, director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s CO2 Programme, said the trend would probably continue throughout 2019 – likely to be an El Nino year in which temperatures rise due to warmer ocean currents.

  1. Why not turn waste into energy?
  2. Cuaca panas dijangka hingga pertengahan September
  3. LPK sedia ‘pulangkan’ sisa plastik ke negara asal
  4. Malaysia bukan tong sampah toksik dunia
  5. Belalai air landa Tanjung Tokong
  6. Expert tells why Klang River still looks like teh tarik
  7. Melestari alam sekitar tanpa beg plastik
  8. Illegal factory owner to be charged over chemical dumping incident
  9. Pencemaran berulang di 2 sekolah dikesali
  10. Caj pencemaran 20 sen di Wilayah Persekutuan mulai 15 Mac