Split The Waste!

There are many things we tend to neglect in life, and one of them is our household garbages! That's definitely something that we need to change as a society. Especially since nowadays, we are capable of finding solutions to our problems quickly and easily, and there are many well-priced services available when we are talking about dumpster rental. It's also important to make sure we are doing all that we can to help our environment in the hard times that it's having now due to us.

Image credit to greatermalaysia.com

But thanks to our Malaysian culture, in fact the process of handling wastes is not that easy after all. We often dump everything from food to recyclable items into one single bag (Even the bag might not be biodegradable itself!) and think, "Aiya the trash collector will do the job, why should we bother?"

Image credit to Cilisos and Malaysiakini

Let's face the reality, many people take the shortcut by just dumping everything unscrupulously, but do you realise it is no longer allowed? Our government has introduced to us the Compulsory Trash Separation program where we must separate the wastes into different bins accordingly. 

Having said that, I realise in my case, the quantity of garbages at home is very little everyday because:

    1. We don't cook much.

    2. We don't eat/drink anything in cans / bottles / jars.

    3. We hardly dispose paper (Everything on digital)

    4. We don't buy newspapers.

Yet....it is not an excuse not to split the trash!

If your house has alot of different garbages, it may be a headache to manage all of them.

No worries, here are some of the tips that come in handy for every household:

1. (Most Important!) Separate your trash by type -- paper products, plastics, metals, glass and food waste. Empty and rinse all food containers.

2. Sort out all appliances and electronics from your tin and aluminum cans as they can be recycled separately.

3. Divide your food waste into animal and compostable plant products.

4. Remove styrofoam, bubble wrap and plastic caps from bottles as they are not recyclable.

5. Gather all of the non-recyclable garbage and dispose of it in your regular trashcan.

In short, just prepare a few small bins at home and dump them into the huge ones accordingly around your neighbourhood areas. 3-colored trash bins like the above can easily be found everywhere, so let's play our part and do good for the earth and overall environment :) 

In fact, Malaysia already has numerous waste-to-energy (WTE) facility to process solid waste and generate electricity, as part of the energy recovery mechanism. It enables recovery of recyclables to release methane-rich biogas for enhancing power generation.

Sounds too technical? Well, that's a huge picture of what our government has been doing, but how can we relate to that? Oh certainly we can! Just reduce and recycle the waste as much as possible, separate the trash, keep our home and community clean at all times.

Let's handle the waste with care :)