Where Does Your Rubbish Go? (Part 1) - Shah Alam Transfer Station

Environmental students love field trips where you can get out from the class and go to somewhere interesting and play. However there are always some places that we are reluctant to go. All of you know what I mean. It must be some nasty places. Well, I have gone to an open dumping site during the trip to Chini Lake last year. A transfer station should be better, right? Oh you have not heard of a transfer station? Neither do I, until this semester, hahaha. 

The view of the main building from bus. You can see a path on the left that leads towards the building. It is where the rubbish trucks go to unload their content.

This building looks nice. But the smell? Err..

Transfer station

Transfer station is a place where all the rubbish trucks go after the collection at respective area so that all the rubbish can be compacted into a larger container and be transported to landfills which are much further from the places where population is dense. Conventional rubbish trucks will directly go to the open dumping sites instead of going to a transfer station due to its limited number throughout Malaysia. We only have 5 transfer stations here:

• Taman Beringin, Selangor
• Shah Alam, Selangor
• Taruka, Johor
• Batu Maung, Pulau Pinang (managed by Penang City Council)
• Ampang Jajar, Pulau Pinang

Shah Alam Transfer Station

Operating by Worldwide Holdings, Shah Alam Transfer Station receives 800 tonnes of rubbish (1 tonne = 1000 kg) from Ampang Jaya, Subang Jaya, Petaling Jaya and Shah Alam each day. The rubbish trucks from the local authorities or licensed private companies will send the rubbish collected each day here and unload the rubbish directly into huge cylindrical containers. The rubbish will be compressed by compactor into this containers and then the containers will be transported to landfills to be unloaded again.

This is the container named silo where all the rubbish will be dumped inside and compressed. Each silo can hold 20 tonnes of rubbish at one load. With an average of 800 tonnes rubbish received, 40 silos will have to be sent out each day.

8 silos can occupy this station at one go.

The station truck that 'install' the empty silo onto the station and 'uninstall' the full silo from the station. There is another similar truck at landfill called landfill truck instead.

I am pretty amazed by the engineering mechanism that they use to transfer this huge and heavy silo from truck to station from station to truck and from truck to truck. Everything goes so smoothly! 

The haulage trailer which carries the filled silo to landfill which is about an hour away from the transfer station.

Transfer station can save the cost of transporting rubbish every day as the rubbish production of people has been increasing over the years. I personally think that everyone should make a visit to the transfer station to see by ourselves how much and how horrible is the amount of wastes we produced. We have not thought about the consequences of these waste production as long as they will be out of sight and out of mind the next day when the rubbish is collected. The condition of the transfer station can be improved, if we separate the recyclable waste and food waste at home. There is no waste separation facility at this transfer station, which means all the rubbish, regardless of its type and recyclability, will be stuffed into the silos and be transported away.

The device that sucks out the odour from the rubbish. It doesn't help much though.

The platform where all the rubbish trucks will unload their content directly into the silos (on the left).

Rubbish scattered at the platform is pushed into the silo using tractors. The sanitary condition at the transfer station is really bad. We should thank the people who have been taking care of our rubbish so that we don't have to deal with it.

There is a reason why we should minimise the moisture content of the rubbish we throw away - to avoid the hard-to-handle leachate, or if we put it into simpler words, rubbish water (LOL). We can often see the trails of leachate following the rubbish trucks on the road. All these liquids come from the wet rubbish that we produced and all of us know that it is really smelly. The rubbish trucks will carry lots of rubbish along with the leachate. These leachate will be treated before being channelled into the drainage system here. Surprisingly, the grey-colour sticky leachate turned into clear water which is slightly yellowish after the treatment!

Leachate treatment plant of Shah Alam Transfer Station.

Pump pit that pumps leachate at the treatment plant.

The sludge storage tank. Sludge is a semi-solid substance resulted from the treatment of leachate, the remaining things after the leachate is treated into cleaner water.

All the leachate will be dumped here first. Well I am not going to get any closer to this thing.

Two filtering machines in the treatment plant.

A tank containing cement-like thing which smelled really badly. I smelled it before I saw it!

Our parents always told us as a little kid, "if you don't study well, one day you will be a rubbish collector". Well seriously everyone should come to a transfer station to see how the workers work to manage our rubbish! This is not to dishonour them but to educate the people to be considerate when producing rubbish. Maybe the rubbish is really something out of sight out of mind, but we should always think of the people who have been providing the services regardless how bad the working condition is.