Semakau Landfill: Refuse Collects Here, but Visitors and Wildlife Can Breathe Free

Lindsey Hoshaw The New York Times 15 Aug 11;

Waiting lists for selective colleges, fine restaurants and overbooked flights are familiar enough — but Singapore may have the only landfill with a four-month wait once you sign up to visit.

Then again, this landfill is no dump. It’s a manmade island that resembles a nature preserve, despite the 9.8 million tons of incinerated waste lying just a foot under the parklike surface.

Singapore’s land scarcity — the city-state is smaller than Rhode Island — has led the government to develop innovative waste disposal techniques. Among them is an island off the southern part of the mainland that opened after Singapore’s last city dump, Lorong Halus, closed in 1999. By joining two small islands in an area roughly the size of Central Park, the government created Semakau Landfill, Singapore’s first offshore dumping ground, and now a popular local getaway.

The $360 million facility includes a 4.4-mile-long sea wall made of sand, rock and clay, as well as a geomembrane of polyethylene, which lines the island’s periphery to prevent leakage. Incinerated trash from the mainland comes over in barges, and the wet ash is emptied into one of several pits, or “cells,” to eventually be covered over with dirt, where palm trees and other plants naturally take root.

Renovating landfills for public use is nothing new. In New York, the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, which closed in 2001, will reopen as a park around 2035. In 1994, Japan turned an old landfill southwest of Osaka into Kansai International Airport, the world’s first ocean airport.

But Semakau Landfill is the only active landfill that receives incinerated and industrial waste while supporting a thriving ecosystem, which includes more than 700 types of plants and animals and several endangered species. “Even though we operate a landfill, biodiversity is still thriving,” said Ong Chong Peng, Semakau Landfill’s general manager. “We want to keep this balance as long as possible.”

Wildlife is so precious at Semakau that the intended perimeter of the landfill was altered to ensure two mangrove forests were accessible to fresh water from the changing tides. Protected species like great-billed herons and Malaysian plovers nest on the island, and endangered Chinese white dolphins have been spotted offshore.

Semakau is also the only active landfill that regularly encourages public visits five days a week. While the eastern side of the island is full of dormant cells waiting to be filled, the capped cells on the western side have welcomed onlookers since 2005.

This year, after more than a decade in operation, the island’s eastern side is scheduled for development and may begin accepting waste as early as 2015. The National Environment Agency, which maintains the site, predicts that with both sides of the island accepting trash, the landfill will stay open at least until 2045.

Sport fishermen come during the day and astronomers come at night to glimpse the sky away from the city lights. School groups are even allowed to wade into tide pools to look for sea anemones and knobbly sea stars. These intertidal walks are so popular that Mr. Ong says they’re booked almost year-round.

Some of the most unusual visitors to Semakau have included a couple who posed for wedding photos on the island in 2007. The bride, Rochelle Tan, said she and her husband, Ong Teow Wee, wanted something unique and Semakau fit the bill “perfectly.” Environment ministers from New Zealand, Japan and Samoa have also stopped by to get inspiration for waste management practices in their own countries.

The Singaporean government extols the success of Pulau Semakau, citing the increasing number of public visitors, which has tripled in the last five years, to 13,000 in 2010 from 4,000 in 2005. “Semakau Landfill has received many praises all round for its innovation to solve one of the most pressing needs of solid waste management today,” said Eng Tiang Sing, director of international policy for the Ministry of Environment and Water Resources.

The National Environment Agency says the unique landfill system it has created reduces the volume of waste by 90 percent, and adds that 2 percent of Singapore’s power comes from energy generated by four mainland incinerators.

But critics admonish a waste management plan that completely relies on incineration. Large-scale incinerators, like the ones in Singapore, have short life spans, sometimes lasting only 10 years before needing replacement.

Environmentalists from Greenpeace say incineration simply changes the waste problem into a pollution problem. “Greenpeace is against waste incineration because it is a major source of carcinogenic substances like dioxin, as well as other harmful pollutants like mercury and volatile organic compounds,” said Tara Buakamsri, Greenpeace campaign director for Southeast Asia.

“Landfilling and incineration are major techniques in all Southeast Asian countries, but such waste disposal practices have created social and environmental problems in our communities,” Mr. Buakamsri said.

Public protests have broken out in Malaysia and Indonesia in opposition to government plans to construct new incinerators, and the Philippines banned incinerators in 1999 because of health risks — the same year the Singaporean government started relying on them to operate Semakau Landfill.

There is also the small but real risk that the waste will leak into the ocean. Protective measures “will likely succeed in preventing leaching into the surrounding water bodies for a number of years, at least a few decades, but will ultimately fail, posing a risk for future generations,” said Scott Kaufman, an adjunct professor at Columbia University and U.S. senior manager at Carbon Trust, a British nonprofit group that seeks to help companies cut carbon emissions.

The National Environment Agency says leakage is not likely and that TÜV SÜD, an international inspection and certification firm, tests the surrounding water for heavy metals each month. They also say that the two mangrove forests surrounding the island, which are highly reactive to toxic material, will act as canaries in the coal mine should anything escape. They are confident that Semakau Landfill can safely accept waste for decades to come.

“If we run out of landfill space, we’re in trouble,” Mr. Ong said. “That’s why this place is so critical.”