KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 20 — PAS will lead green lobby groups in pressing Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s administration to stop plans to build more incinerators and use more environmental-friendly methods to cut and manage waste.
PAS environment bureau chairman Zulkefly Mohamad Omar said the party will first organise a roundtable talk in April to draw up a memorandum to the government.
Zulkefly said the memorandum - which is expected to contain alternatives to using incinerators to deal with the nation’s waste - will be submitted to the prime minister, ministers and MPs.
If necessary, the memorandum will also be handed over to the Yang Di-Pertuan Agong, Zulkefly said.
“We will have a roundtable discussion, PAS Central and Green Clean World will call all the NGOs to discuss waste management,” Zulkefly, who is also the chairman of environmental group Green Clean World told reporters today.
S. Arutchelvan, the secretary-general of political party PSM who was also present at the press conference, said representatives from the federal government and state governments will be invited to join the discussion.
Zulkefly stressed that the non-governmental organisations was not merely objecting to the operation of incinerators, but also wanted to contribute suggestions.
He also urged Putrajaya to halt all plans to build incinerators elsewhere in the country unless in-depth studies are carried out, naming Taman Beringin Kepong, Bukit Payung in Johor, Tanah Merah Sendayan in Negri Sembilan and Sungai Udang in Malacca as other possible incinerator sites.
He voiced fears that waste-burning would involve the release of potentially cancer-causing chemicals, and added that incinerators are costly and would use more energy than recycling programmes.
Last November, a group of opposition MPs told the government to cancel plans to build an incinerator in Kuala Lumpur, claiming that it would likely only add to the existing pollution that comes with solid waste.
A group calling themselves the Kuala Lumpur Against Incinerator (KTI) action committee are seeking to kill the proposed project over concerns that it would end up becoming a health hazard.
KTI chairman Isaiah Jacob previously said that the government failed to prove that it is capable of managing incinerators based on the findings of the 2012 Auditor-General’s report, which said that the country faces a shortage of experts to run existing incinerators in the islands of Langkawi, Pangkor, Tioman and Labuan and also in Cameron Highlands.
Isaiah had also said that the technology still spews out between 20 and 30 per cent of toxic materials comprising heavy metals, dioxins and toxic gases out of the solid waste that is processed, leading to documented health hazards as suffered by residents in the United Kingdom and in Japan in areas that were within a five-kilometre radius of an incinerator.
