Taman Rekreasi Worldwide Landfill Park Air Hitam (Puchong)

Malaysia / Selangor / Balakong / Puchong
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Building paradise from a wasteland

The Star
By LIM CHIA YING

AFTER serving as a sanitary landfill for 11 years, the site at Air Hitam in Puchong will soon be transformed into a public park.

Currently, the 25ha site is halfway through a five-year rehabilitation process which started soon after the landfill was closed in 2006 following a decision by the Selangor government.

Operator Worldwide Landfills Sdn Bhd (a subsidiary of Worldwide Holdings Bhd) will green the site that would feature recreational facilities like a jogging and walking path, cycling track, fishing pond and even a go-kart area after the final capping is carried out this year.

“It will be a public park, ready for use in two years.

“After this safe closure is in place, we’ll hand the entire site back to the state as part of our contract,” Worldwide Landfills operations engineer Imran Ishak said when he took StarMetro on a tour of the landfill to view its post-closure maintenance.

If anything, a visit to the landfill served as a timely reminder that recycling should be vigorously practised and that we should cut down on our waste, as it only ends up choking the landfills.

Since 1995, the landfill had received solid waste collected from Klang Valley areas like Kajang, Petaling Jaya, Subang Jaya, Shah Alam, and Ampang.

But when waste from Kuala Lumpur was sent there as well from 2002, the amount proved to be too much.

The landfill received its last load of garbage in December 2006, effectively cutting nine years from its planned lifespan.

State-owned Worldwide Holdings Berhad had been awarded a 20-year concession-cum-privatisation contract to operate the landfill and the contract was to have ended in 2015 and included a five-year maintenance period after it was closed.

However, the deal had to be cut short when Air Hitam reached its maximum capacity.

“When new housing developments came into this area, the state had ordered us to close,” Imran said.

“With this sanitary landfill closed, solid waste is now diverted to other landfills which we have opened in Jeram (Selangor West) and Kuala Langat (Selangor South), which is now under construction,” he said.

While in operation, the Air Hitam landfill received some 6.27 million tonnes of solid waste.

All access to the landfill is through a weighbridge system and the garbage was then taken to huge pond-like structures called cells, which were built for waste disposal.

There are 18 cells at the landfill, and 17 of them were full but the last one could not be used as the directive to shut down had already been received.

“As a result, it was left abandoned and accumulated rainwater over time.

“So, we had to put in fish to eat any mosquito larvae that might have been breeding inside,” he said.

All the other cells have been covered with earth to prevent rainwater from seeping through, while the final capping using a geo-synthetic liner will be carried out once the waste has settled.

“Two by-products are produced from a sanitary landfill and these are leachate and methane gas” Imran said.

Interestingly, Worldwide Landfills has creatively tapped into the potential of the methane as a source of fuel for power generation.

Some of the gas is flared, or burnt, daily to convert it into carbon dioxide and water.

At the same time, 71 gas wells that have been dug as deep as 30m extract the gas for a 2 MegaWatt gas-powered generation plant located inside the landfill area.

“This is a joint-venture project between TNB and us under the 8th Malaysia Plan for renewable energy.

“It is estimated that there is enough gas here to power the generator to provide about 15 years of electricity to about 2,000 households,” Imran said.

The electricity project, which began in 2003, will resume operations in June this year once maintenance on one of the Jenbacher engines is completed.

Imran also said there were weak points in the structure where the gases could escape but said the seepage was being monitore closely on a daily basis.

He said the leachate was channelled to a pumping chamber to be sent to a treatment plant before being released in to the waterways.

He added that the process complied with the strict guidelines of the Department of Environment.

Imran added that waste in Malaysia was highly organic with a high moisture content.

He said this contributed to the high level of contamination and the heavy rainfall also helped generate more leachate.

“Today, there is only about 100 cubic metres of lea chate daily and we are planning to produce fertilizer from this by channelling it to the ammonia stripper plant,” he said.

Air Hitam was also the first sanitary landfill in the country to team up with a Dutch-based company to make an effort to reduce the emission of green house gases under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) project of the Kyoto Protocol 1997
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Coordinates:   3°0'1"N   101°39'40"E

Comments

  • it was a landfill
  • http://www.worldwidelandfills.com/news_2006_01.htm Why the Ayer Hitam Forest Reserve should be preserved One of three lowland forests in Selangor Provides a green lung for urban areas A site for research and education for UPM Role in public environmental education programme For wildlife habitat and in situ conservation An orang asli cultural site Role in recreation and eco-tourism Role in micro-climate regulation Role in carbon sequestration A water catchment Its biological wealth 430 plant species 127 timber tree species 98 species of medicinal plants 39 moss species, one-third of the 136 species found in Selangor 14 small mammals such as rats, squirrels, tree shrews and the slow loris 13 bats 5 of the 10 species of primates found in the peninsula: the banded-leaf monkey, dusky-leaf monkey, white-handed gibbon, and the pig-tailed and longtailed macaque 10 reptile species 18 amphibians 10 fish species 160 bird species
  • The Ayer Hitam landfill, due to close in December, will be returned to the state government seven to 10 years later. "We have advised the state that it should then wait a further five to 10 years before doing anything structurally. In the meantime, the site can be turned into a park." We all cautions that landfill mining does not render a landfill suitable for development Geo-technical studies are still needed to deter­mine the exact boundaries of the landfill and the extent of pollution at the site. Landfill mining, he says, is not merely digging out the waste but should be done with care to prevent explosion risks.
This article was last modified 13 years ago