AUGUST 20 — Malaysia is entering a strengthening El Niño, and the public conversation is about heat, haze and water supply. 

Almost nobody is asking what a long dry spell does to the ground we have already filled with waste. 

More than 170 closed landfills sit beneath this weather, capped and quiet. 

Drought dries and cracks the soil caps. Buried waste and the methane it produces become easier to ignite, a danger best described by the Malay proverb “bagai api dalam sekam” (translated to mean “fire smouldering unseen in the husk”). 

During the 2018 dry spell the proverb turned literal, when landfill fires broke out at Bukit Bakri in Muar and Pekan Nenas in Pontian. 

Rivers running low lose the dilution that normally hides a leachate discharge. And when the rains return, as they always do, months of accumulated leachate can be flushed out at once. 

A closed landfill does not experience weather as an average. It experiences episodes. Our monitoring does not.

The people who feel those episodes first are the ones living beside the fence. In Sungai Pusu, Gombak, a residents’ committee has written twice to the Selangor state authorities, a year apart, describing foul air, dust and a daily procession of garbage trucks past their homes. 

Two years of direct observation produced no sampling visit, no measurement and no entry in any dataset. 

The residents were not short of information. Our waste policy simply does not say what officials must do with it.

That gap has three parts. Malaysia’s post-closure regime focuses on custody: fence the site, cap it, budget for its upkeep and keep it in the ledger. 

It does not say how closely a site must be watched: there is no minimum sampling frequency, number of sampling points or detection standard. 

It gives no route for observations from outside an agency to enter the official record. 

And it requires no response: nothing states what must follow a worrying result, or by when. 

These are gaps in policy, not in technology or budget, which makes them relatively cheap to fix.

Consider what Malaysia already spends. A 2022 MIDA overview, citing the National Solid Waste Management Department, reported 174 closed landfill sites and 137 active landfills, of which only 21 were sanitary landfills with proper engineering. 

The same overview put government spending on solid waste collection and public cleansing at RM1.9 billion. 

The public purse already spends heavily on waste management, yet we still know too little about the risks at closed sites.

The distinction matters because closure is not an ending. 

Buried waste can produce leachate and methane for decades after the last load is tipped, and at many older, unlined sites no engineered barrier separates it from the groundwater below. 

In 2019, a bund at the CEP Renggam landfill in Johor failed, worsening ammonia pollution in Sungai Benut; a water treatment plant shut down and supply to about 75,000 consumers was disrupted. 

A closed landfill can produce decades of environmental risk. At present, too little of that risk is being measured.

Three provisions would close these gaps, and none requires new landfill engineering. 

First, a public register of closed sites showing monitoring schedules, sampling points and results, with a clear detection standard and extra sampling after weather extremes, heavy rain as well as prolonged drought, not only on fixed calendar dates. 

Second, a standard community reporting protocol with formal standing under the appropriate federal or state law, so that a resident’s observation becomes an official record, not merely another letter. 

Third, a trigger: a clear pattern of readings or reports that requires official sampling within a fixed period. 

We have drafted such a field protocol for community monitoring at closed sites, using fixed sampling points, an upstream control, sampling after heavy rain and regular checks against accredited laboratory results. 

It is freely available. What it lacks is formal standing.

Post-closure risk does not follow a schedule. It is driven by episodes of extreme weather: intense rain in one phase of the climate cycle, prolonged heat and drought in the other. 

Leachate rises after heavy rainfall, a bund weakens over a monsoon rather than a fiscal quarter, and a dry spell can prime a site to burn. 

Yet monitoring is often arranged for administrative convenience: a quarterly visit, a handful of boreholes, a filed report. 

A quarterly sample may miss the few days when the greatest risk appears, so a clean record is not proof of safety; it may simply show that monitoring was too infrequent. 

In Malaysia, failure to detect a problem is too often treated as proof that no risk exists. 

Increasing official sampling across 174 sites may be costly. One practical answer is to increase the number of observers. The observers are already there.

People living beside these sites notice conditions every day: bad odours, discoloured water in a drain after a storm, fish deaths in a nearby stream, subsidence, cracks and seepage at the foot of a slope, even respiratory complaints occurring at the same time. 

Treated as anecdotes, these observations become complaint letters that are easy to dismiss. 

Put into a simple standard form, with a time, a location, a few fixed categories and a consistent scale, they become a detailed record that no agency schedule could afford to reproduce. 

The Sungai Pusu residents lacked a protocol, not information.

The usual objection is that community reports may be biased or inconsistent: observers are untrained, effort varies, and complaints may cluster around vocal individuals. 

These concerns can be managed. 

Community reports should not replace official sampling; they should trigger it. 

Regular agency testing can check the community record, and a simple statistical rule can turn a repeated pattern of reports into a formal alert. 

Used this way, a resident’s observation does not replace a laboratory result. It tells the laboratory when to show up.

This is why legal standing and a response deadline must come together. 

A reporting protocol without legal standing is only a suggestion box, and the Sungai Pusu sequence may simply repeat: observations submitted, acknowledged, nothing measured. 

The proper federal or state instrument should require agencies to receive and record a resident’s report, with a defined response window that makes the duty clear and auditable. 

Standing without a deadline allows indefinite silence; a deadline without standing has nothing to attach to.

Malaysia already spends heavily on waste management, but it does not adequately measure the risks beneath closed sites. 

This El Niño will pass, and the rains will return; the buried waste will still be there. The cheapest monitoring resource available to the state may already be living next door.

* Dr Azizi Abu Bakar is a Research Officer at the UM Sustainable Development Centre (UMSDC) and a Data Steward for the UM Open Science (UMOS) initiative, and Dr Norli Anida Abdullah is a statistician and Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Foundation Studies in Science, Universiti Malaya (PASUM).

** This is the personal opinion of the writers or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.