Selangor’s waste system built for contractors, not communities

 Despite major investments, Selangor’s waste management is contractor dependent, and suffers from weak enforcement and outdated governance.

Malaysia’s municipal waste management system is rather peculiar and should be low hanging fruit in terms of improvements if ever there were local council elections.

That would put a stop to practices designed to help garbage contractors but resulting in unintended consequences that endanger public health and the safety of local council ratepayers.

Remember last October when a garbage truck crashed into a toll plaza along the Damansara-Purchong expressway? Investigations by the police and the road transport department (JPJ) revealed that the truck was registered to KDEB Waste Management Sdn Bhd (KDEBWM), a Selangor state government company. It also uncovered 22,000 summonses issued to KDEBWM’s trucks.

That led JPJ to seize 22 garbage trucks for various offences, including operating without insurance, motor vehicle licences, and proper drivers’ licences.

KDEBWM owns and operates a fleet of over 1,500 vehicles, leased to approximately 1,000 sub-contractors across Selangor. In contrast, London with its population of nine million, has four contractors, with some boroughs maintaining their own municipal cleaning and waste collection teams.

Between 2016 and 2020, KDEBWM invested more than RM260 million to purchase these new trucks in a bid to modernise waste management. This was intended to allow KDEBWM to implement technological solutions, including GPS and CCTV systems, and improve safety standards.

In April 2025, KDEBWM announced a new RM400 million allocation to gradually replace over 1,400 roll-on, roll-off trucks (a.k.a. ro-ro trucks), with environmentally friendly Euro 5 technology. The company has also launched a pilot project for EV compactor trucks in Shah Alam.

Sub-contractors lease these trucks for the duration of their contract. Typically, ownership of the truck can be transferred to the sub-contractor after a five-year period.

While KDEBWM is responsible for the vehicles’ manufacturing defects, the sub-contractors are responsible for daily maintenance, including ensuring they are roadworthy.

In practice, however, most garbage contractors are not bothered by summonses issued for traffic and JPJ offences simply because they are issued to KDEBWM as truck owner.

Likewise, proper vehicle maintenance by garbage contractors is mere wishful thinking, demanding a review of how rate payers’ money is spent.

Meanwhile, the recent unhappiness voiced by Petaling Jaya and Subang Jaya residents about uncollected garbage since two months ago, coinciding with the appointments of new garbage contractors, is to be expected since the Selangor government is conflicted between supporting its large community of garbage contractors and providing top-class public sanitation services for its estimated 7.4 million population.

Another huge inconsistency is the manual emptying of the wheelie garbage bins, using bare hands.

Wheelie bins were first introduced as a pilot project in PJ’s Kampung Medan when I was the general manager of Sitamas and the late Puan Kamariah was in charge of MBPJ’s landscape and waste management department. She was passionate about modern waste management and drove the project, including engagement sessions with the garbage contractors, residents’ associations and surau committees.

These were high-quality German-made plastic bins and we were concerned that the bins would disappear inside the houses to be used as water containers since this was a middle to low-income area. As it turned out, the householders were very proud of their bins and MBPJ had to replace very, very few of them.

But the contract tenure was too short and the price per household was too low for us to invest in compactor trucks with bin lifters.

In theory, all the workers had to do would have been to wheel the high-quality plastic bin and engage it to the truck’s bin-lifter which would then tip the bin and its contents into the truck.

Municipal waste management is a complex service that requires logistics expertise, mechanical engineers and a lot of local solutions from the grassroots service managers, truck drivers, residents and their associations.

The durian season, for instance, leads to spikes in municipal waste loads, as does the throwing out of bulky waste that precedes major festive seasons.

Efficient municipal waste management is a characteristic of advanced countries. In Japan, there are different schedules for dry and wet waste which are religiously adhered to. Singapore’s six million populace is served by four waste contractors, two incinerators and several landfills.

On a national level, the federal government undertook a national waste management plan in the mid-1970s that saw the country quartered into four main concession areas.

Four consortiums were awarded contracts following public bidding. Alam Flora, a subsidiary of DRB-Hicom, was awarded the well-to-do central region of KL and Selangor. Its role in Selangor, however, ended in 2011.

Selangor then decided to restore these duties to individual local authorities to reduce management costs and address public complaints regarding service quality. Local councils managed their own waste independently until KDEBWM came into the picture.

Logistics is another bottleneck. The 24-year-old Taman Beringin transfer station — Kuala Lumpur’s only garbage hub — is beyond economic repair, creating long queues. Depending on the situation, supervisors will divert garbage trucks to landfills, wasting time and manpower. Chronic labour shortages further strain services.

Fortunately, the newer Shah Alam transfer station, using silo or cylindrical compactors, is more robust and has achieved good uptime.

Meanwhile, the privately-operated Bukit Tagar sanitary landfill is world-class, featuring cells with clay liners on the floor to receive municipal waste and leachate, compacted and regularly topped with earth. Methane gas from the cells and the leachate treatment are extracted to power waste-to-energy turbines.

While household waste separation at source remains voluntary, the Selangor state government is expected to implement the Solid Waste and Public Cleansing Management Act 2007 (Act 672) by September this year.

The Jeram waste-to-energy plant is scheduled to begin operations in the first half of this year and will have an installed capacity of 2,400 tonnes of waste daily.

Overall, Selangor’s challenge is organisational rather than technical.

Analysts say the state must professionalise operations, recruit experienced waste managers, modernise transfer infrastructure, enforce household sorting, and consolidate contracts under four or five large and capable operators.

Without structural reform, service quality is likely to remain inconsistent despite continued, but inefficient, investments. - FMT

 Yamin Vong is on Facebook yamin.com.my.

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