I Followed My Nasi Lemak Leftovers to a Landfill to See How I'm Ruining the Planet

It’s gettin’ hot in Malaysia. Granted this is a tropical island on the Equator, where the first British colonizers to arrive with their waistcoats and breeches found the climate “fatal” and “frying,” so we sorta have a pretty good idea what warm is.

Or at least we thought we did, until now. The Meteorological Department recorded close to a one degree celsius increase in temperature since the '80s. I might not sound like much, but so far it's enough to make the world’s ice melt, raise ocean levels, and expose us to more extreme heatwaves.

Long gone are the days where wearing sarongs and living in wooden houses were enough to stave off the heat. I remember my childhood in the early '90s, in an air-conditioner-free home, at peace with the heat and humidity. Fast forward to last week, I counted three air-conditioning units in my parents' home alone. And despite water being abundant here, the 2016 heatwave saw several dams deplete to critical levels, sent durian exports plunging, and caused more than 250 schools to close.

At the same time, major floods, which were rare in the 1980s Malaysia, have happened four times between 2010 and 2017. It’s fast looking like the only thing more extreme that the scale of our corruption scandals and our continued insistence that child marriages are just fine, is our extreme weather patterns.

Watch: China's Waste Ban Is Causing A Trash Crisis In The US

What’s going on? I harbor deep suspicions of capitalism and even deeper ones my fellow for Malaysians and our seemingly infinite supply of ignorance when it comes to important things like the environment, as somehow playing an influential role in this.

We may have ratified the Paris Agreement and aligned ourselves to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, but I’m not convinced we’re anywhere close from preventing drastic global warming in the decades ahead. Globally, carbon dioxide use needs to fall by 45 percent by 2030 in order for us to reach net zero emissions and avoid the worst effects of climate change by 2050, according to a UN report. Anything less, and we risk more extreme heat, displacing hundreds of millions, especially the poor and vulnerable.

But as Malaysians, we just love plastic too much, hate recycling too much, and think we're too good to use public transport. So we're completely screwed.

To put this cynical view to test, and to relieve the stress that usually comes from talking about climate change, I chose our national pastime — eating — to find out what harm a seemingly harmless act can do.

NASI LEMAK STALL, 7:30 AM

I’ll admit I almost called this article off the night before. Ignorance is bliss, and a part of me did not want to find out how much I was part of the problem so I could continue my pathological consumption without guilt. But I’m a 28-year-old working in a semi-creative job and I need money from this side hustle, so there I was the next morning stuck in rush hour traffic just to get to the nasi lemak stall a mile away from my apartment.

Ten minutes later, I’m home and eating the absurd mountain of rice and chili in front of me. I pack the remnants—one waxed paper wrapping, rice, one plastic disposable spoon—into a tiny red plastic bag it came in and threw it into the general waste bins downstairs.

APARTMENT, 10 AM

My initial idea was to attempt this investigation the rogue way. In my mind, I would surreptitiously tail the trash collector truck and covertly see what happened to said breakfast. Obviously, this was a terrible idea as I have zero espionage skills. Plus, a concerned colleague told me my plan of convincing the trash collectors and their bosses wouldn't fly. So I surrendered and got an official permit.

I watch as three Indonesian workers hoist the 1.5 meter by 1.5 meter bins into the back of the truck. It disappears into the sea of other colorful plastic bin bags. As they get compressed to drain the liquid out, the machine squirts some waste juice on me. I asked myself again why I pitched this story.

“We’re going to the Tanjung Dua Belas landfill at Sepang,” the manager tells me. It’s an hour or so away by car, he says, but we’ll need to stop to fill some petrol first.

Turns out “some petrol” is equal to 131 liters of diesel, a day’s worth, according to the manager. I do some math using EcoScore’s fuel consumption calculator and found this emits an equivalent of 345.84 kg of CO2 per day and 6,916.8 kg of CO2 per month.

THE ROAD TO HELL, 11:30 AM

It’s hard to visualize kilograms of CO2 but not what I thought waited for me at the end of the 70 kilometer journey to the landfill. Or so I thought.

Situated at the southern-west end of the state, the Tanjung Dua Belas landfill looked nondescript from the entrance.

“We’ll have to take this to go up,” the engineer at the landfill tells me, gesturing at an SUV next to him. Up? Up where? All I see at this point is an elevated land covered in brown mud. I ask if we can just walk. That’s not possible, he said.

I get into the SUV, which goes around the elevated land before making a right. It starts climbing, and climbing, and climbing.

“We are driving up to level 21,” the engineer said. “Level 21 means 21 meters of trash,” he said.

The “land” that I thought we were on, were really made from trash that’s been covered up with soil — all 21 meters of it. The landfill spans 160 acres, the engineer explains, and he’s about to show me the rest of the uncovered parts.

“Are you ready?” the engineer asked.

I wasn’t.

THE UNCOVERED PARTS OF THE LANDFILL, 1 PM

Before this trip, I spoke to Ng Sze Han, the state government’s exco member in charge of the local government portfolio. He told me the way waste is managed in Selangor right now is far from ideal. The majority of the waste in the state arrives is unseparated and end up all together in landfills.

Still, even this is a “lesser evil,” Ng said. They would rather live with a landfill full of recyclable waste than having it all end up in our rivers and seas.

Waste separation at the source is a critical step towards better waste management, he said, but it’s rarely practiced.

“This is the biggest challenge we are facing now,” Ng said.

Out of 167 operating landfills across Malaysia, only seven or 4.2 percent are in the sanitary landfills category as of 2010. Each day, they collectively receive more than 40,000 tonnes of household, commercial and industrial waste per day. Per day.

Knowing all this didn’t make the sight in front of me now any less apocalyptic.

Spanning the width of a football field, plastic bottles, furniture, stuffed toys, polystyrene, diapers and millions more plastic bags containing god-knows-what, rise up in mountains around me—all three million tonnes of it collected since 2010. A dozen or so trucks dump more into it as I looked.

At a corner, I spot a huddle of 1.5-meter-tall bags packed with plastic bottles. Next to it, a group of Indonesian workers, hired to salvage whatever is recyclable from this hell, rest.

If there's one image that captures our stunning selfishness, where we need to get someone else to clean up our shit, or our galling failure to not care about the environment, this is it.

Men and women, so desperate to earn a living, spend their days in this stench and heat in modern slavery because Malaysians can’t be bothered to sort their own waste out. I am told there are 50 such workers here, only enough to separate 1 percent of the waste.

The rest is buried, its leachate treated into usable water, and once all this the trash reaches its maximum level, the state government plans to use the adjacent land to start the process all over again.

A waste-to-energy incinerator, which can convert the methane gas generated from the landfill into electricity or heat, is in the plans, but it will be a year or so before it will be ready here, the engineer tells me. As of now, the three million tonnes worth of waste will lie here, emitting an estimated 3.6 tonnes of carbon pollution into the atmosphere.

“All the landfills in Malaysia are like this. Some are even worse,” he said.

This is our mess. Single-use plastic straws are the de rigueur thing to hate now. But what this experiment taught me is that's just a tiny part of the equation. Our entire way of “doing” things, from driving to buy nasi lemak to throwing it away mindlessly, needs to go.