Plan to turn Sg Akar landfill into a park

Source: Brunei Times by Rasidah H A B. To view article from Brunei Times website click here.

BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

THE Brunei Economic Development Board (BEDB) is planning to close the Sg Akar landfill and turn it into a recreational park.

The board recently opened tenders for the design and construction of the systems and facilities for the closure and transformation of the 33 hectare rubbish dump site and for the operation and maintenance of the adjoining 20 hectare site as a transitional rubbish dump site for a period of up to five years.

Among the essential requirements to be met by the potential companies is that it must be a reputable local, international or joint venture company with relevant expertise in solid waste management and the engineered closure of solid waste dump sites.

The transformation project aims to rehabilitate the rubbish dump site and transform it into a green zone which can be used for recreational purposes, with landscaping, ponds, roads and other facilities.

The Sungai Akar landfill at the moment is operating at full capacity, and receives most of the 300 tonnes of waste per day produced in Brunei-Muara district. The current conventional dumping system is no longer appropriate to handle the waste.

Previously, The Brunei Times had reported residents' complaints that the rubbish landfill area is not only a persistent nuisance with foul smell and flies everywhere, but also poses serious environmental and health hazards.

The transformation of the rubbish dump site would require eradicating rodents, pests and the foul smell emanating from the site within the shortest period possible. The project also requires the implementation of an engineering system to remove contamination to ground and surface water.

The tender also calls for a facility for public education to promote awareness on the transformation of the dump site and the importance of solid waste management.


*Bahri: finally my prayers have been answered!*

Sungai Akar Dumpsite

Source from informative Mr. Brunei Resources' article here.

Not In My Backyard

I thought I will spend a bit of time on the rubbish dump problem that everyone is talking about nowadays. Sungai Akar Dump is interesting - not rubbish dump interesting but it makes a classic administrative failure case study.

The history of rubbish dumps in Brunei has always been where the municipal waste goes to. Once Brunei starts urbanising, that is when rubbish starts being created. Most of us who lived in the non city centre in the earlier days learnt how to deal with our rubbish earlier on which is mostly burning them. But in the municipal area, there are trucks and rubbish collectors who do the rubbish throwing for the residents. In the very early days, rubbish was dumped at Pusar Ulak being the first rubbish dump in Brunei. As Bandar grows bigger and encroached to Pusar Ulak, it was Batu 2 at Jalan Tutong where the second rubbish dump was created.

But even Batu 2 gets encroached by the enlarging Brunei Town, the third dump site was near where the City Hall is at the moment at Kumbang Pasang. Even that was found unsuitable before rubbish was dumped at Jalan Menteri Besar, next to where Ministry of Health is. Yup, that huge forest next to MOH was a former rubbish dump site. The forest has been thinned up now and there is a park built by the Environment Department on it. For a time before government agencies started to be built in the area, Jalan Menteri Besar was for a time known as Jalan Sampah. By the early 80s, that started to be too full and search went on for the fifth dump site.

And that's when Sungai Akar started. Sungai Akar was supposed to have closed down by the end of the 1990s and something to replace it. Sungai Akar was essentially a municipal dump site but by then, rubbish collectors sensing a business opportunity offered their services not just to rubbish inside the municipal area but also to the growing number of households outside it. More and more rubbish was collected and more and more are dumped into Sungai Akar. Everyone expects BSB Municipal Department to find a solution. But it is not their fault too. Bandar Seri Begawan Municipal Department does not have the ability and by 2004, the newly created Environment, Parks and Recreation Department under the Ministry of Development was asked to take over.

It was only then studies are conducted and by this year under the new five year Development Plan, was the money available to do something about Sungai Akar. Finding a new dump site is not easy - it suffers from the NIMBY effect. Not in my backyard. Alternatives - incinerators etc. But ashes from incinerators need to be kept properly too and not to mention the gases it produces. There are other bio alternatives too. These also suffered from NIMBY effects and other side effects too. What is also important is to get everyone to save and to push the idea of recycling and reusing so that there will be less sampah by every citizen of this country.

Orang utans to be extinct in 50 years

 Don't you people care about us anymore?!!!!

 Don't you have any sympathy? Look at us!!

Sabah’s isolated orang utan population in lower Kinabatangan may become extinct in 50 years if no steps are taken urgently to set up wildlife corridor between fragmented forests.

Scientific journal Oryx in its latest publication said although the Kinabatangan population of 1,100 orang utans was more then enough for their survival but many of them were separated into small pockets of less then 250 animals.

It says much more work needs to be carried out to ensure the survival of the orang-utan. It also stresses that that the “pockets” of orang-utan population need a minimum number of 250 orang-utan individuals to survive in the long term.

“It is essential that conservation measures are taken to protect orang-utans outside national parks, and these measures will by necessity be specific to each region,” Oryx wrote in the newly released paper entitled “Distribution and conservation status of the orang-utan on Borneo and Sumatra: How many remain?”

Conservationists and scientists from 16 institutions, including Hutan, a French NGO, wrote the paper.

The Sabah Wildlife Department and Hutan have been studying orang-utan occurrence in protected and unprotected areas for a number of years.

Together with their partners they have engaged the landowners such as the Sabah Foundation, the Sabah Forestry Department as well as private landowners (mostly palm oil companies) in developing innovative conservation strategies to address the issue of orang-utans in unprotected areas.

Genetic modelling carried out by conservation geneticist Dr. Benoit Goossens of Cardiff University and Dr. Isabelle Lackman-Ancrenaz of HUTAN had shown that the majority of the isolated orang-utan populations in the Kinabatangan would go extinct in less than 50 years if nothing is done to reconnect the populations.

“Having ‘wildlife corridors’ linking isolated lots of forest that are home to orang-utan as well as other wildlife such as the Bornean pygmy elephants, are absolutely crucial to ensure that this wildlife continues to exist in the Kinabatangan,” said Dr Ancrenaz.

The paper also shows a study that reassessed orang-utan populations in Borneo and now finds that an estimated 75 percent of orang-utans in Kalimantan occur outside protected areas.

The Sabah Wildlife Department had in 2004 with HUTAN published a paper in the scientific journal, PLoS Biology that showed that 60 percent of orang-utans in Sabah live outside protected areas. The study was funded by the Danish International Development Agency (Danida).

It was a landmark paper for the world of orang-utan conservation as up to that point scientists in other areas of Borneo and Sumatra (the only two places in the world the orang-utan survive in the wild) were mostly studying and working on orang-utan populations within primary forests which were almost all protected areas, such as national parks.

Hutan has been working together with the Sabah Wildlife Department to develop and implement solutions to conserve the orang-utan in Sabah, Malaysia for the past 10 years.

Plasma, LCDs blamed for accelerating global warming

A gas used in the making of flat screen televisions, nitrogen trifluoride (NF3), is being blamed for damaging the atmosphere and accelerating global warming.

Almost half of the televisions sold around the globe so far this year have been plasma or LCD TVs.

But this boom could be coming at a huge environmental cost.

The gas, widely used in the manufacture of flat screen TVs, is estimated to be 17,000 times as powerful as carbon dioxide.

Ironically, NF3 is not covered by the Kyoto protocol as it was only produced in tiny amounts when the treaty was signed in 1997.

Levels of this gas in the atmosphere have not been measured, but scientists say it is a concern and are calling for it to be included in any future emissions cutting agreement.

Professor Michael Prather from the University of California has highlighted the issue in an article for the magazine New Scientist.

He has told ABC's The World Today program that output of the gas needs to be measured.

"One of my titles for this paper was Going Below Kyoto's Radar. It's the kind of gas that's made in huge amounts," he said.

"Not only is it not in the Kyoto Treaty but you don't even have to report it. That's the part that worries me."

He estimates 4,000 tons of NF3 will be produced in 2008 and that number is likely to double next year.

"We don't know what's emitted, but what they're producing every year dwarfs these giant coal-fired power plants that are like the biggest in the world," he said.

"And it dwarfs two of the Kyoto gases. So the real question we don't know is how much is escaping and getting out."

Dr Paul Fraser is the chief research scientist at the CSIRO's marine and atmospheric research centre, and an IPCC author.

He says without measuring the quantity of NF3 in the atmosphere it is unclear what impact it will have on the climate.

"We haven't observed it in the atmosphere. It's probably there in very low concentrations," he said.

"The key to whether it's a problem or not is how much is released to the atmosphere."

Relation To Global Food Crisis

There are many ways where environmental issues throughout the world can be related to the global food crisis:
- Oil is largely used in the transportation of food, thus the skyrocketing oil prices has contributed A LOT to the worldwide increase in food prices
- Oil is also used in the production, i.e. in fertilizers, as well as in the manufacturing of food
- Climate change is a major factor, reducing land that's available for cultivation and generating more weather disasters that wipe out food crops, and the amount of land that could be cultivated with food is finite
- Primary types of fishes farmed (sustainably) for food have decreased significantly due to climate change
- Et cetera…



It's not just that demand is getting bigger, but there are limits on how much it's possible to increase supply. Thus, food prices WILL soar continuously.

In five years' time, we could be living in a world where millions are dying in famines with no food aid to hand, regular storms and droughts wipe out acres of crops, and skyrocketing food prices have created global political panic, food experts say.

Food costs have shot upwards so quickly that even a consumer in a rich country who doesn't usually keep track of the price of bread will have noticed it. And anyone who counts the pennies has been feeling the pinch already, as global food prices have risen 83 percent over the last three years.

It puts the Western diet in question. Cutting down on inappropriate consumption of meat and dairy foods would be in everyone's interests. It's the least efficient kind of food production, and these are the foods that create health problems when people eat too much of them.

India and China's growth shows no sign of slowing, and the hunger for meat among their growing middle classes is a major factor in pushing grain prices up.

Now we’ve seen how the food crisis is intimately linked to energy factors as well as environmental issues... So, what happens if the world doesn't adapt, and food costs just keep on rising?

In the worst-case scenario, humanity will be struggling to cope with wars and deadly famines, new diseases, water shortages, and storms and droughts that wipe out crops. Oil will cost something like $200 a barrel, and there will probably be a global recession as food prices keep on rising.

Penguin Chicks Frozen By Global Warming??

At night, when the mercury dipped below freezing, the wet chicks froze.

"Many, many, many of them—thousands of them—were dying," Explorer Bowermaster said.

The experience, he added, painted a clear and grim picture of the impact of global climate change.

"It's not just melting ice," he said. "It's actually killing these cute little birds that are so popular in the movies."

The freezing of chicks is just one example of how human activity is endangering about two thirds of all penguin species, according to a new paper based on decades of research and observations.

The conservation biologist behind the paper, Dee Boersma of the University of Washington, points out some of the many ways penguins are suffering, such as by ingesting oil from spills, by being run over by tourists, by having their nesting times confused by climate change, and by losing their prey to changing currents.

Sad. 

CCA 3/7/08