Time to clean up our act on waste

Time to clean up our act on waste

Five years ago, the average person in Thailand produced 300g of rubbish a day. Today that figure stands at 1.15kg, an almost four-fold increase that can only partly be blamed on the proliferation of coffee chains and convenience stores.

The end result is obvious, and it came as a shock to no one last week when Natural Resources and Environment Minister Vichet Kasemthongsri said Thailand was producing more waste than ever. Also unsurprising was an admission, which seemed to get lost in the haze of the week-long toxic fumes emanating from the Samut Prakan fire, that the vast majority of waste facilities in Thailand are operating outside official guidelines. Mr Vichet should also have said they are woefully inadequate.

The fire, at its worst consuming more than 100 rai of household and industrial trash, occurred on private land that had operated outside the country’s official waste-management framework. As today’s Spectrum reveals, because the site is on private land there is little authorities can do. Police say they have no jurisdiction, the Tambon Administration Organisation can only issue fines.

But in many ways it’s no surprise facilities of this kind exist to fill the shortcomings of the system. Samut Prakan is a heavily industrialised province and the number of housing estates there is also quickly rising. It is the province that generates the second-highest amount of waste, and yet has only one official and regulated waste treatment facility.

The dump in Samut Prakan is far from the only one of its kind operating in Thailand. Of the country’s 2,490 facilities, 2,024 do not follow the guidelines properly. Only 19% of facilities are correctly disposing of and treating rubbish. Mr Vichet said waste at the other 81% of facilities is either left in open-air dump sites or burned. The Samut Prakan dump fire could be the canary in the coal mine — the kind of environmental and health hazard we have been seeing for the past week could be repeated many times over.

A Department of Special Investigation inquiry launched in 2012 found that only 12 million tonnes of toxic industrial waste was being disposed of according to the law, out of the total 41.5 million tonnes reported.

Assuming these figures are correct, this is a slightly better result than the overall waste-management picture. But no one deserves any praise when almost three-quarters of the country’s industrial waste is being so badly mismanaged, especially when much of it is toxic.

The fire at Samut Prakan could have severe and long-term health consequences for those residents who live closest to the dump and were most affected by the smoke. Almost 1,000 people have already suffered immediate health problems.

While laboratory testing is still to be undertaken, it is almost certain there was industrial waste at the dump. Authorities are not only worried about the smoke, but the water run-off from firefighting efforts — they have already detected contamination.

Experts have warned it could be years before we know the full extent of the health effects.

Thailand has a bad track record of responding to such environmental disasters — for evidence look no further than Kanchanaburi’s Klity Creek, where lead contamination since the 1980s came to light and was halted in the late ’90s, but is still yet to be properly cleaned up.

The Samut Prakan fire has led to calls for further talks about reforming the system and strengthening pollution controls and laws. Well-intentioned as these suggestions are, what is needed really is a total overhaul.

Proper enforcement and holding those responsible for the most egregious crimes accountable will only take the country so far. No matter how brilliant a law is, if it gets broken 81% of the time with only token punishments then it may as well not exist.

Stricter enforcement alone will not be enough. The reason more than 2,000 facilities are operating outside the guidelines is because the 466 that follow the rules are not nearly enough to cope with the amount of waste generated.

They are helping to fill a need, but they require investment and should be encouraged to become legal sites that can be properly monitored.

More than that, there needs to be clear regulation with one body overseeing the nation's entire waste-management system. Whether it is the Environmental Protection Agency or the Pollution Control Department or some other body, it needs to be given real powers to act.

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