Waste management can be defined as the discipline and activities to manage waste from

its inception to its final disposal including collection, transfer and transport, processing and
disposal of waste. Due to the aggressive economic development these decades in Malaysia, the
waste produced by our people including industrial waste, bio-logical waste, municipal waste
and others has been increasing years by years. Generally, our country will be producing over
23,000 tonnes of waste every day and only less than 5% of it is being recycled. This has been
causing a big environmental issue now because it affects all the people’s daily in our country
and especially our health.

As we know, any waste produced must be managed and disposed wisely because it may
cause many different types of pollution such as air pollution if we chose open-burning as the
way to manage our waste; it may also cause water and soil pollution if the hazardous material
is combined with raining water. In addition, waste management is essential to a country since
it can help in a proper and judicial use of land resource and conserve its aesthetic value
(Jayashree et.al., 2012).

However, there are still some irresponsible people and industry employers who are not
being considerate. A lot of illegal dumping of waste especially chemical waste by industrial
area has been raising some issues these days which caused serious impacts to our country
development. Recently on the 25th of November 2019, an explosion was happened in Tambak
Jawa, Selangor due to the illegal dump of hazardous chemicals which then caught fire. The
factory operating around the river has been reported to dump the chemical waste without proper
management due to the cost of clean-ups.

Therefore, it is vital for all of us to learn about the proper ways to management waste
and the consequences if we do not perform it properly. In this paper, we will be discussing
several methods of waste treatment and disposal.
 Composti
ng

Incinerati
Pyrolysis
Waste on
Treatment
and
Disposal

Landfillin
Recycling
g

Figure 1 Several Methods of Waste Treatment and Disposal

Jayashree Sreenivasan, Marthandan Govindan, Malarvizhi Chinnasami and Indrakaran

Kadiresu (October 26th 2012). Solid Waste Management in Malaysia – A Move Towards
Sustainability, Waste Management - An Integrated Vision, Luis Fernando Marmolejo Rebellon,
IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/50870. Available from: https://www.intechopen.com/books/waste-
management-an-integrated-vision/solid-waste-management-in-malaysia-a-move-towards-
sustainability