Water on the moon but not in Selangor: Here’s the solution

 

Just two weeks ago, social media was ablaze after NASA found water on the moon. When popular educator and molecular biologist Raven Baxter tweeted about it, quite a few cheeky Malaysians decided to comment on the thread about how there was water on the moon but not in Selangor.

It made enough of a splash to catch her attention, leading her to lament about how we haven’t even been able to take care of our basic water needs here on the Earth.

I’m sure this did no favours to our national reputation which has taken significant hits in the past few months, thanks to the women, family and community development ministry’s cretinous Doraemon comment earlier this year, the seemingly unending political turmoil and, most recently, Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s incendiary tweet about the terrorist attacks in France.

And now, yet again, Sungai Selangor is polluted, causing water cuts to a whopping 1.1 million households in the Klang Valley yesterday.

It boggles my mind that this has now become our new reality – water disruptions every few weeks for days on end. It’s a reality that involves people toting plastic buckets and lining up to collect water from water tankers. I’ve seen this happen in some underdeveloped countries, but how is this happening here in Malaysia?

I don’t remember this being an issue during my childhood.

How has Selangor, whose GDP grew 6.7% last year – the highest among the states, even exceeding the national GDP of 4.3% – regressed to a point where water disruptions are the norm, not the exception?

This obviously needs to end. Thankfully, the Selangor government has indicated that it’s serious about ridding this problem once and for all by announcing several measures, including spending RM200 million on river pollution mitigation, which it says would reduce water disruption risk by 90%.

Here are some of its proclaimed initiatives:

1. Higher fines for water pollution violations;
2. Implementation of the Polluter Pay Principle, where river polluters will be required to pay a certain amount to the state to cover the cost of restoring the damage caused by their pollution;
3. A bio-remediation pioneer project to restore the water quality of the rivers;
4. 24-hour surveillance in key areas along the Selangor and Langat river basins as well as installing more water telemetry devices as part of an early warning system;
5. Initiating a project to pump raw water from the HORAS 600 water ponds in the Selangor river and the Pond C in the Semenyih river; and
6. Initiating the use of 4 DJI Matrice 300 high technology drones to monitor rivers in Selangor and guard against pollution of water resources.

While these are steps in the right direction, they don’t go far enough. Here are some additional things that should be done:

Dehydrate pollutants and utilise the byproducts

The best type of wastewater is one that doesn’t even enter our life-giving rivers.

This is where Zero Liquid Discharge (ZLD) technology comes in handy. It’s a treatment process that’s designed to filter, purify and remove all the water from wastewater, producing only solid waste.

The water that exits the system is pristine, potable water. Its byproduct, the dehydrated solid waste, can either go to a landfill or, better still, be used among other things as construction material.

This is exactly what a Swedish-Norwegian consortium, led by the recycling company Merox, is doing after realising the benefits of using solid waste as building material after mixing it with binding agents.

All industrial plants that exceed a certain size and waste output quantity need to be mandated to have an on-site Zero Liquid Discharge system. The government should help these companies set it up, providing tax breaks and incentives as it sees fit so as to ensure buy-in of the initiative.

The solid waste can then be sold to companies that see the benefits of using solid waste as part of their building material, reducing the need to rely on fresh building material that often needs to be quarried, leading to further environmental degradation.

Increase “skin in the game” for potential polluters

How corporations function is almost entirely dictated by the legal and financial incentive structures they operate under. If there are those who flout the rules and get off scot free or operate in a legal grey area with little to no repercussions, it’s often because the incentive structure allows for such errant behaviour.

The fact that pollution has become rampant is indicative of the fact that we haven’t installed the right incentives to eradicate the problem. This has led to a tragedy of the commons – everyone tries to maximise their revenue and in so doing, they externalise their impact on the environment. This invariably leads to poorer living conditions for all of us.

A simple trick to counter this is by instructing factories to take in water downstream from where they dump their wastewater. This way, if they dump highly polluted wastewater, it will directly impact their operations, which usually require non-polluted water.

Additionally, the government could even ask them to use water downstream from where they dump their wastewater for their own consumption in the factory as tap water. I’m sure factory owners wouldn’t want to jeopardise their health and that of their workforce.

This selfish need to look out for themselves and their own will ensure they clean up their wastewater prior to releasing it into the river.

Use IoT tools at factories’ wastewater outputs

We should harness the full power of the Internet of Things (IoT) tools at our disposal today. We can do this by utilising a host of pollution detection sensors that are now available. This includes:

1. Total organic carbon (TOC) sensor
2. Turbidity sensor
3. Chlorine residual sensor
4. Conductivity sensor
5. pH sensor
6. Oxygen-reduction potential (ORP) sensor

Just as every house has an electric meter, every factory should have a pollution meter. This would require the factory’s wastewater pipe to be fitted with a suite of sensors that detect water pollution levels and relay it in real-time to the authorities. This will give the authorities near-complete oversight as when there is river pollution, they would be able to pinpoint the culprit and prosecute them.

This would undoubtedly be far more effective than having periodic spot checks which are standard practice for the Department of Environment (DoE).

Monitoring via drones, while helpful in specific situations, is largely unfeasible as they’re loud enough to alert miscreants and have a flight time of under only an hour, greatly reducing their usefulness.

However, the sensors detailed above, coupled with a camera, a microcontroller, a radio transmitter and a rechargeable lithium ion battery – all solar-powered – could form a powerful, yet relatively cost-effective IoT module that keeps factories in check.

With these initiatives in place, I’m confident that we’ll be able to flush out these frequent water disruptions into the deep trenches of the past. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.