Waste management is set to be a major challenge for life in the Klang Valley.

My wish is that more is done by environmental groups to speak about us struggling for landfills, and the landfills becoming unusable because of contamination by leachate leaks and not having enough land.

Taking land and putting garbage in it is old as time and we need new solutions to answer these problems.

Everything I hear about landfills is about problems and if they find new landfills other than Jeram, they will have to be travelling far.

We should not be exporting garbage to other states. I am afraid poorer states like Pahang and Perak will end up with all of Kuala Lumpur’s garbage, because of the money.

More and more countries are moving to incinerators and this might be a solution.

No city can live without giving out the trash and Kuala Lumpur and Selangor cannot become modern without producing rubbish. In Selangor, we are not required to separate the recyclable from the non-recyclable.

But the most important thing is to consider new ideas and incinerators are better, as proven by Scandinavia. Countries there, like Sweden, have energy incineration plants for waste, which clear garbage without producing harmful smoke.

Instead, the burning of waste will produce energy we can use. Which means, even electricity bills can drop if there is free electricity from the incinerators.

The idea to have an incinerator in Selayang has been passed back and forth, and the time has come to test the technology. I think environmental groups should be joining the committee to discuss the issue, and I am sure with the government and environmental groups working together, a better solution will emerge from the cooperation.

There is a lot of evidence that incinerators, if carefully managed and with the proper expertise, will provide an answer to this garbage problem, which is getting from bad to worse.

According to statistics, there are eight million people in Selangor and Kuala Lumpur and this population will keep increasing for the next 20 years. Giving water and also clearing the garbage people in the city will produce will become more and more a huge problem.

As I said, the countries in Scandinavia, like Sweden, have conducted a strategy of both reducing the trash produced and after that, using incinerators so that there will be no large areas of dirty landfills.

While landfills are not using complicated and dangerous machines, they are just collecting trash, which is not a problem that just disappears.

I’m afraid that if we don’t start this method now, we become over-reliant on landfills and get stuck in the past.

I am worried about our love for landfills based on fears of new solutions. I hope the mayor of Kuala Lumpur, menteris besar and even opposition members can work together on this problem.