Municipal Solid Waste Case Study

Starting from 2008 to 2025, it is predicted that Johor, Malaysia will become more populated, prosperous and production and as a service-based city due to the massive developmental activities of Iskandar Malaysia project city plan. However, the rapid development in Johor also indicated that the generation of solid waste will increase significantly. For this reason, Abba et al. (2013) conducted a case study to assess the environmental impacts of municipal solid waste of Johor by analytical hierarchy process. The assessment is conducted in the city of Johor Bahru which involved Municipals of Johor Bahru Tengah, Johor Bahru municipal council and Pasir Gudang municipality. Data were collected through contacts and questionnaire survey and analytical
The assessment revealed that the most critical environmental impacts are fauna and flora, habitat depletion and land used. Then, landfilling, recycling, incineration and composting were evaluated in terms of the environmental impacts. Among these disposal options, composting and recycling are found to be the disposal options preferred for the area of study. Recycling of waste is perceived to preserves fauna and flora, stream ecology, habitat depletion, improves air quality as well as land use while composting is perceived to be the best option in terms of preservation of stream ecology, habitat depletion and land use practice. However, the study also emphasised that the data obtained from this study is insufficient. Future research such as life cycle assessment of the impacts of the alternatives to the environment needs to be conducted to gain more guided decisions in the solid waste management. Besides, since a successful waste management relies on adequate regulation and supervision, waste disposal in Malaysia should be supervised strictly to maintain resources on earth and to reduce its negative impacts on the
Recently, a quantitative study was carried out by Alhashimi & Aktas (2017) to assess the environmental and economic performance of biochar when used as an adsorbent for heavy metals in comparison to activated carbon through a meta-analysis. The study enables a comparison between the two materials by using a realistic functional unit for adsorption rather than using mass or volume for comparison. In this case, different locations from different continents and regions inside the US were used as scenario variables to estimate the impact of long-distance trade on the environmental performance of biochar. Data on the environmental impact of biochar and activated carbon were collected through peer-reviewed journal articles on life cycle assessment (LCA) of biochar and activated carbon. A total of 84 different types of biochar and activated carbon were identified from the literature and corresponding data recorded. The statistical analysis tool @Risk version 7 was used to analyse environmental impacts of biochar and activated carbon resulting from adsorption of heavy metals. From the analysis of data, it was indicated that biochar has lower environmental impact than activated carbon. For greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, biochar on average was found to have