We also heard of a mythical far away land we called landfill. All the banished unwanted items from our home were transported to this mythical land where they will never be seen again. Many young people of my generation only heard of its existence. None of us have seen it. Is it even real? It is a place just somewhere beyond the border down south. And I heard, if you stand facing the southern wind, you can smell the foul stench sometimes. Legend has it some of the very ground we walk on now used to be a landfill. All we know from our elders is that we should stay away from that treacherous place.
I am not apologetic when I say that I have little concerns about what happen to our trash. And I do not spend much time thinking about it. I think I speak for the majority of KL folks regarding how we feel about our trash. The most arduous task we are willing to handle involves taking the garbage from our front door to the garbage bin outside. Or for the case of apartment, we take it to a communal bin in the vicinity. Even that simple task, most KL folks cannot do it properly. We still lack civic consciousness. We are very comfortable littering indiscriminately at public places. Our government is still facing the problem of indiscriminate open dumping problem both in the city and rural areas. Recycling? Yes, everyone knows about recycling and how it can help reduce waste and help the environment. Our government has even set a target of having 20% of our collected waste recycled by 2020. Currently, 96% of our collected solid waste goes to the landfill and the rest are sent to a small incinerator still in testing. Out of the total collected waste, 5% are currently being recycled. Whenever the topic comes up in conversation, I still notice that fleeting guilty looks across my friends' faces. We do feel guilty not contributing much to the effort. But that guilty feeling probably last for only a few second before all our other preoccupations took over.
At the end of the day, we're all very happy with the great disappearing act and faithfully believe in the mythical land that will gobble up our trash forever. And so we live happily forever after... until?
