Dirty business
It would appear that either the Selangor State government is totally discombobulated (in a state of confusion) or they are just as embroiled in the same crony politics as their predecessors from BN.
Last Thursday they agreed to give Worldwide Holdings Berhad’s environment division Worldwide Landfills Sdn. Bhd. RM6.5 million of rate payers money to close an old landfill that the federal government had already spent RM2 million to close in 2004. And if this isn’t crazy enough, on November 25th 2008, Mentri Besar, Khalid Ibrahim, gave a privately funded green tech company the go-ahead to rehabilitate the same landfill. Furthermore, a representative from that green tech company was instructed to attend Thursday’s meeting, asked to sign the attendance register before the meeting started and was then barred from the meeting itself.
The landfill in question, Sg.Kembong, is the 85 acre site at Bukit Mahkota near Beranang, Selangor. Ever since the landfill was closed in 2004 there has been sporadic leachate contamination of the Bernanang and Semenyih rivers and this is currently being exacerbated by an illegal sand mining operation in the area which is eroding the river bank right back to the landfill.
CLEAR, the green tech company that M.B.Khalid appointed to clean up the site, have already contained the leachate away from the river and have started to mine the garbage to produce refuse derived fuel (RDF) which is used as a renewable energy source for steam turbines and cement kilns. Their Waste to Energy approach will leave the site clear of all garbage and contaminants so that it can be handed back to the state government for further development when their present 21-year lease runs out. The income CLEAR will get from the recoverable items plus RDF mined from the site allows them to offer this service free of charge to the Selangor government.
