Plastic Waste Management
in Malaysia: Current
Status, Key Challenges and
Opportunities
By Umi Fazara Md Ali, Nor Ashikin Ahmad, Norshah Aizat Shuaib,
Universiti Malaysia Perlis
FEATURE
Al Amin Mohamed Sultan,
Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka
Nowadays, plastics are considered an
essential material in our daily lives. The
expansion of its consumption in Malaysia
and globally has provided certain societal benefits.
These include safe food storage and consumer
products, improvements in the health sector,
growth of clean energy, building and construction
and in transportation. Since 1950, global
production of plastic materials has progressively
increased. Currently, the world is producing more
than 340 million tonnes of plastics a year [1].
Many common plastics such as polyethylene,
polypropylene and polystyrene are made from
hydrocarbon monomers. These plastics are made
by linking many monomers together into long
chains to form a polymer backbone. Although the
basic makeup of many plastics are carbon and
hydrogen, other elements can also be involved
which include oxygen, chlorine, fluorine and
nitrogen. To cite some examples, polyester and
polycarbonates contain oxygen, polyvinyl chloride
(PVC) contains chlorine, nylon contains nitrogen
while teflon contains fluorine [2]. Generally, it
takes from 15 to 10,000 years to degrade these
plastic materials. If mismanaged, this plastic
waste will end up in landfills, beaches, rivers and
oceans, contributing to devastating environmental
problems. Plastics represent one of the waste
fractions with the smallest recycling rate. Globally,
only 9% of plastic waste is recycled, 12% is burned
and the remaining 79% ends up in the landfill or
the natural environment [3].
OVERVIEW OF CURRENT SITUATION
In Malaysia, plastic consumption per capita
increased to over 35kg per year with the demand
growing 6% annually [4]. Demand continues to
increase as the population grew, with Malaysia’s
population growing at a rate of 1.30% as of
2020 [5]. Nonetheless, what makes plastics so
convenient in our daily lives is because it is cheap,
making it ubiquitous, resulting in one of the
planet’s greatest environmental challenges.
The management of solid waste in Malaysia
is placed under the Solid Waste And Public
Cleansing Management Corporation (SWCorp),
an agency under the Ministry of Housing and
Local Government (KPKT), which is a federal
statutory body incorporated through the Solid
Waste and Public Cleansing Management
Corporation Act, 2007 (Act 673). This Act provides
the establishment of SWCorp with powers to
administer and enforce the solid waste and
public cleansing management laws and related
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