Garbage of Eden

Garbage of Eden

Want to be at one with nature? Take a stroll around Singapore’s island of trash.

By Eric Bland

SINGAPORE’S only landfill is a 20-minute ferry ride south from the main island. On Pulau Semakau, coconut trees and banyan bushes line an asphalt road. Wide-bladed grass, short and soft, forms a threadbare [1]carpet. The only visible trash is a bit of driftwood on the rocky shore, marking high tide in an artificial bay. Water rushes out of the bay through a small opening, making waves in the Singapore Strait. The smell of rain is in the air.

You would never know that all the trash from Singapore’s 4.4 million residents is being dumped here 24 hours a day, seven days a week – as it will be for the next 40 years. This is no ordinary landfill: the island doubles as a biodiversity hotspot, of all things, attracting rare species of plants and animals. It even attracts ecotourists on specially arranged guided tours. Eight years in the making, the artificial island is setting an example for the future of conservation and urban planning.

Pulau Semakau, which is Malay for Mangrove[2] Island, is not the first isle of trash to rise from the sea. That dubious honour goes to a dump belonging to another island nation, the Maldives, off the southern coast of India. In 1992, the Maldives began dumping its trash wholesale into a lagoon on one of its small islands. As the island grew, it was named Thilafushi; its industries include a concrete manufacturing plant, a shipyard, and a methane bottler.

What distinguishes Semakau from Thilafushi – and most any other landfill – is that its trash has been incinerated and sealed off from its surroundings. Singapore burns more than 90 percent of its garbage, for reasons of space. Since its independence from Malaysia in 1965, Singapore has grown to become one of the world’s 50 wealthiest nations. Not bad for a city-stage little more than one-quarter of the size of the smallest US state, Rhode Island. Its rapid rise, however, created a huge waste problem. In the early 1990s, the government began to heavily promote a national recycling program and to campaign for industry and residents to produce less waste.

From trash to ash

Since 1999, garbage disposal companies have been recycling what they can – glass, plastic, electronics, even concrete – and incinerating the rest. The Tuas South incineration plant[3], the largest and newest of four plants run by the Singapore government, is tucked away in the southwest part of the main island. A recent visit by New Scientist found it surprisingly clean and fresh. The incinerator creates a weak vacuum that sucks the foul air from the trash-receiving room into the combustion [4]chamber.

Not that incineration is problem-free. When Singapore began burning garbage, its carbon emissions into the atmosphere rose sharply while its solid carbon deposits dropped, according to data gathered by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. During the last couple of years, however, its emissions have stabilized. “Our recycling program has been more effective than we anticipated,” says Poh Soon Hoong, general manager of the Tuas South plant.

Once they started burning trash, the big question was where to put the ash. In 1998, the government built a seven-kilometre-long rock bund[5] to connect two offshore islands, Semakau and Sekang, and named the new island Pulau Semakau. The complex cost about 610 million Singapore dollars (US $400 million). The first trash was dumped there in April 1999, the day after the last landfill on the main island closed. “We weren’t trying to design an island that would attract tourists,” says Semakau’s manager, Loo Eng Por. “Disposing of the waste was a matter of survival.”

How they do that is key to the island’s success. At the receiving station, cranes[6] unload the ash from barges [7]into dumptrucks, which drive out to one of 11 interconnected bays, called cells, where they dump their debris (see Plan). The seawater is first pumped out of a cell, which is then lined with a layer of thick plastic to seal in the trash and prevent any leakage. Materials that can’t be burned or recycled, such as asbestos, are wrapped in plastic and buried with dirt. Each month, samples are tested from the water surrounding a working cell, and so far there is no sign of any contaminated water seeping into the ocean. Four of the 11 cells have been filled to about two metres above sea level, then topped with dirt and seeded with grass. A few trees dot the landscape. “Gifts from the birds,” says Loo. “We plant the grass, but not the trees.” Once all the cells are filled, which will be in 2030 or so, workers will start over again, dumping burnt trash onto the plots and covering it with earth gradually forming taller hills. The government predicts that by 2015 its recycling and waste elimination programs will make its landfills obsolete.

One complaint about Pulau Semakau was that it called for the destruction of mangroves on part of the original island. Singapore’s National Environmental Agency saw to it that the mangroves were replanted in areas adjoining the landfill. “We expected some of the new mangroves to die off,” says Poh. “But they all survived. Now we have to trim them back.” The island now has more than 13 hectares [8]of mangroves, which serve as a habitat for numerous species.

“Pulau Semakau is quite a success,” says Wang Luan Keng of the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research at the National University of Singapore, and by all accounts the ecosystem is thriving – so much so that since July 2005, the island has been open for guided tours. “Visitors are stunned and amazed to see the rich biodiversity,” says Ria Tan, an expert in ecology who runs wildsingapore.com, a website on nature-related activities in the area. At low tide, nature groups walk the intertidal zone, where they can see starfish, snails, and flatworms. Coral reefs are abundant off the western shore, and dolphins, otters, and green turtles have been spotted. Fishing groups come to catch and release grouper, barracuda, and queenfish. Birdwatchers look for the island’s most famous resident, a great billed heron named Jimmy, as well as brahminy kites and mangrove whistlers[9]. In 2006, the island logged more than 6,000 visitors, and that number is expected to rise.

The island is crucial to Singapore’s future. “People may say the Semakau landfill is bad,” Tan says. “What is the alternative? Toss it to some other country? Kill off some other habitat on the mainland? The garbage has to go somewhere. I see Semakau landfill as an example of one aspect of successful, sustainable urbanization.” Tan shares the concerns of city planners. “The resource constraints that Singapore faces today will be those the rest of the world will face eventually.

That is why the rest of the world should be watching: time will tell whether Semakau is a useful model for conservation. Meanwhile, the island’s managers would like to see it become a permanent nature reserve where people can come to hike, relax, and learn about nature, without a guide. As Loo says, “It’s a great place to get away from the boss.”

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[1] threadbare: thin layer

[2] mangrove: a tropical tree that grows in the md or at the edge of rivers

[3] plant: a factory

[4] combustion: the process of burning

[5] bund: embankment or wall

[6] crane: a tall machine with long arms, used to lift and move heavy objects

[7] barge: a large boat with a flat bottom, used to carry goods

[8] hectare: a measurement equal to 10,000 square metres; 2,471 acres

[9] heron, kite, whistler: types of birds that live near water

✳ Click on the hyperlinks to see the visualizations of each word - and click on the pictures to see its definition on English Oxford Living Dictionaries. 
✳ Take a look at Spotter's Guide to Pulau Semakau Island to get to know more about the wildlife mentioned in the article.