sim leoi leoi The Star 30 May 19;
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.
The draft regulation, said the DoE, was still under review by the Attorney General’s Chambers.
“The scheduled e-waste regulation does not have to be tabled in Parliament,” it said.
Environment waste management specialist Dr Theng Lee Chong said the new regulation proposed by the DoE would likely take the form of an Extended Producer Responsibility system, which has been applied in many countries, including the European Union, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and China.
Under this system, which is based on the concept of shared responsibilities, manufacturers and importers must pay a recycling fee upon the put on market of their products, so they are responsible for the products until the latter’s “end of life”.
“The recycling fee will be used to pay for the proper collection and recycling of the e-waste in an environmentally sound manner,” he said, adding that this system emphasises the responsibilities of manufacturers and importers.
“Of course, other stakeholders such as retailers, collectors, recyclers and consumers also have their respective roles,” said Theng, who worked with the expert team put together by the Japan International Cooperation Agency to help the DoE formulate the regulation.
At present, the management and control of e-waste is regulated under the Environmental Quality (Scheduled Wastes) Regulations 2005, enforced since Aug 15, 2005.
Under this regulation, e-waste is categorised as a scheduled waste. Any importation or exportation of it is regulated under Section 34B of the Environmental Quality Act 1974 and the Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Waste and Disposal 1989.
The DoE said enforcement of the regulation was currently only for the management of e-waste generated from industrial premises.
“There is no legal mechanism for the control and management of e-waste generated by households.
“Also, there is no formal system for managing household e-waste in an environmentally sound management system for recovery and disposal,” it said.
According to The Global E-Waste Monitor 2017 Report by the United Nations University, Malaysia generated 8.8kg of e-waste per person in 2016, totalling 280 kilotonnes.
That year, the world produced 44.7 million tonnes of e-waste – or 6.1kg per person – which is equivalent to the weight of 4,500 Eiffel Towers.Most e-waste contains precious metals (such as gold, silver, platinum and palladium), iron, copper, aluminium and plastics that can be extracted and sold.
The report also estimated that secondary raw materials from e-waste were worth €55bil (RM254.65bil).
But much e-waste also contains rare earth, hazardous metals (such as mercury, lead and cadmium) and chemicals like chlorofluorocarbon and flame retardants.
Dumping or illegal recycling of e-waste can cause these materials to leak into the environment.
There are 87 premises with partial recovery facilities and 37 premises with full recovery facilities licensed by the DoE.
‘No law against household e-waste disposal despite risk’
The Star 30 May 19;
PETALING JAYA: No action can be taken against the low-cost, low-technology handling of e-waste because it is not against the law despite
its potential health and environmental hazards, says an environment waste management specialist. Dr Theng Lee Chong, who is also deputy chairman of the Association of Environmental Consultant and Companies of Malaysia, said there was no regulation to control household e-waste, which usually ends up in the so-called informal sector.
“This means that at the moment, there is no regulation that stops you from selling or giving your scrapped television to a scrap collector or even a charity organisation.
“That’s why a new mechanism is needed to put all these things in order and have proper controls. Then, only the enforcement will have the mandate to ensure that all e-waste is only sold to authorised collectors and is recycled at licensed facilities,” said Theng.
“They receive microchips, capacitors and other parts from the electronics and electrical industries instead of washing machines, TVs, refrigerators and other items from households,” he said.
He added that many of these facilities were designed to handle industrial e-waste only and could not properly recycle most household items.
“Not all household e-waste is economically viable to be recycled, such as washing machine and refrigerators. These have ‘negative value’ in terms of recycling.
“The small players in the informal sector mostly dismantle household e-waste for the plastics and metals (iron and copper). They can’t recover precious metals like gold and silver in such waste,” he said.
Crude recycling methods bad for health and environment
The Star 30 May 19;
KUALA LANGAT: Much of the e-waste in Malaysia has ended up in the hands of scrap collectors and scavengers who have no qualms about burning cables and wires to get to the metal within, although this method is bad for health and the environment.
There were scorched patches in the ground along the dirt road leading to an e-waste dumpsite in Sri Cheeding, just outside Jenjarom in Selangor. An acrid smell filled the air.It was clear that scavengers had burnt and shredded parts of electrical and electronic items to remove valuable materials such as copper.
About the size of two football fields, the dumpsite was strewn with bits and pieces of circuit boards, keyboards, plastic casing, cables, computers and mobile phones.Jenjarom is already notorious for its mounds of plastic waste. This particular spot for dumping e-waste is on a piece of land less than 200m into an oil palm estate just off the main road out of the town.
It apparently attracts many scavengers, usually locals.
When The Star first visited the site on April 3, there was an orange signboard with the words “Dilarang Menceroboh. Tanah Kerajaan” (No trespassing. Government land). However, there was no one around.
On a second visit on May 16, a tractor was covering part of the dumpsite with soil and the signboard was gone.
A boy aged about 12 was collecting cables and wires. A motorcycle was parked nearby.
The boy lit a fire beside the dumpsite and burned the cables. This produced black smoke and a noxious stench.
“Is it not dangerous?” we asked the boy. He shook his head.
“I am looking for wires, (I burn them and) sell them for RM20 per kilo,” he said, adding that he would sell the parts to a nearby shop selling scrap metal.
He said he needed the money to give to his mother, adding that he usually went to the dumpsite after school.
On Feb 24, NGO Sahabat Alam Malaysia (SAM) highlighted the Sri Cheeding dumpsite on its Facebook page.
It said the dumping of e-waste at the location exposed the impact of waste imports on the informal recycling sector.
“From our surveys and observations, SAM has come across workers in the informal recycling sector who are exposed to health risks while processing e-waste, which sometimes involves crude recycling techniques such as burning the plastic housing of electronic equipment and shredding waste without wearing ay personal protective equipment,” it said.
“Exposure pathways impacting public health is through accumulation of leached chemicals in soil, water and food, as well as direct contact or inhalation of the fumes when the waste is burned.”
SAM said besides dioxins and furans released through these processing methods, persistent organic pollutants, brominated flame retardants and other man-made chemicals used in electrical and electronic devices were a cause for concern.“We call for the prohibition of imports of waste, and for stringent enforcement measures and action to be taken against perpetrators polluting our environment and impacting public health,” it said.
According to a report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in 2013, electrical and electronic waste was the fastest-growing waste stream in the world due to the rapid turnover of gadgets, particularly in the European Union, Japan and the United States.
It also found that e-waste was often diverted to the black market to avoid the costs associated with legitimate recycling.
Also, additional revenue was gained through the recovery – mostly by environmentally unsound means – of valuable metals from the electronic components.
The report warned that the informal recycling of illicit e-waste posed a serious threat to public health as it involved burning plastic, leaching lead into the soil and the release of other toxins into the environment.
The report also said that while China was the main dumping ground for e-waste in Asia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam were secondary centres for the trade.
But in 2018, China decided to block waste imports, including plastic and e-waste.
