Xiyao Fu
Once your nasty trash is neatly contained in an opaque white plastic bag and tossed into the rubbish chute, you never have to worry about it again. However, your trash still has a long way to go until it reaches Semakau Landfill — which was our first destination on the two-day Environment Camp.
Semakau Landfill lies south of Singapore. Once or twice a day, barge transfers incineration ash and non-incinerable waste from Tuas Marine Transfer Station to Semakau Landfill — Stinking, dirty, disgusting, repelling … these mental images of trash haunted me during the ferry ride, but thankfully none of them came true.
“Do you think Singapore is clean?” our tour guide asked as he showed us photos from the 1960s, in which men dug trenches by the road in order to bury the overflowing amount of trash. “No! Singapore is cleaned!”
Inside the little gallery of the Semakau Landfill visitor center, we heard about and saw how our waste management system has transformed tremendously since the 1960s till today. In the old days, people tried to eliminate their rubbish by digging holes and burying it deep underground. However, when it rained, the rainwater would seep through the pile of rubbish, and polluted water would trickle down to the water table and out to rivers and sea. It was only in 1977 that Singapore’s rivers were cleaned of its trash and waste. Since 1970, the amount of waste we produce each day has ballooned from 1,260tonnes to 8,443 tonnes. The government has also built the Semaku Landfill and Tuas Marine Transfer Station, which cost $646 million, to meet Singapore’s landfill need till 2035 and beyond. It is unbelievable how much human and natural resources are dedicated to the sole purpose of managing our never-ending amount of waste!
As the tour bus drove into the waste transfer building, our guide opened the door and told us to breathe in deeply. Apart from the noise coming from the trucks, we found nothing unusual in the building. As we took the bus around the landfill, we were amazed by how benign it seemed: bushes and plants thrived in the filled-up landfill cells, a monitor lizard swam in the unfilled cell, mangroves crowded along the shoreline, and corals grew in the shallow sea waters. Fish nursery, electricity-generating solar PV and wind mills and experimental plantations also added diversity to this man-made offshore landfill. The presence of a black membrane embedded in the perimeter bund separating the landfill and the sea may be a subtle reminder of how thin the line is between the natural environment and the landfill. But not only was the nature protected by the impermeable membrane and the seawall, it was also protected by the various regulations, laws and restrictions put in place to strictly control and manage every step of the waste management process. While Semakau Landfill keeps our waste out of sight for now, it has a permanent effect on our living environment and is a constant drain on our resources. Can our waste be contained by this membrane forever? Will it come back to us again someday? Standing on Semakau Landfill, it is obvious that although Singapore can be cleaned by constantly upgrading our technology, the country’s waste doesn’t disappear, but continues to exist substantially in our system, leaving a deep footprint on nature as well as society — a debt for future generations.
Semakau Landfill is a feat of engineering, demonstrating with hope and pride how Singapore has managed to overcome its waste issues quickly, neatly and even beautifully. However, it also doomed by an expiry date and the high costs that go into building and maintaining such a structure. With Singapore devoting a great deal of resources into maintaining the current system of waste incineration and landfill disposal, I wonder how we can target at the root cause of waste generation problem and make our living more sustainable and preserve the beauty of nature for the future.
