That was how it was in PD yesterday morning. My wife said it was hazy all the way up to Nilai. I was wheezing like an old man about to die, wondering if I should go to KLIA and just give up. The thought of Indonesian planes crashing due to smoke from forest fires was part of the reason I decided to stay put!

I don’t think it’s all Indonesia: the smoke was a bit too acrid yesterday, like it hadn’t travelled very far. The loss to the country in immediate lost productivity and ongoing health problems must be huge. There should be an immediate crackdown on open burning. I heartily support Najib carpet bombing offenders, spraying them with automatic gunfire and then C4ing them too. He can indefinitely detain their relatives and friends too, without access to legal advice, if he likes.

If it’s any help to anybody caught in the smoke, shutting the door to my office yesterday, and repeatedly mopping the floor and washing and hanging up wet towels seem to make the air much more breathable. Probably there are expensive technological solutions too, but that was cheap and seemed to work.

Even my kids were coughing like lung cancer victims yesterday!

Hey there’s a thought – at last – a use for the water cannons!

Does anybody have any good links to any satellite images of the burning? I see plenty of old ones from the time of New Scientist’s “Neighbour from Hell” article.

Good find pakpandil – that made it very obvious why it was so bad here yesterday! Prompted by your post, a search for ‘meteorological site:gov.my’ turned up met.gov.my and doe.gov.my – met.gov.my has an East Malaysia satellite hotspot image that shows it’s not just Indonesia’s fault:

http://www.met.gov.my/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=209&Itemid=1588

Can we revisit the East Malaysia communications topic and propose a decent monitoring platform that can capture forensic-quality images of firestarters? Deliberately causing misery on such a massive scale ought to be punishable as terrorism , I would have thought. Since Malaysia has the death penalty, could we apply it to a few forest burners please? In the recent Australian bushfires, a man was charged with arson causing death. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to apply similarly severe charges here.

Perhaps this is another question for the IGP. Haze causes and hastens death. Given that it’s such a severe and long-running problem, why is nobody being charged? We cannot ask Indonesia to tackle their arsonists until we demonstrate we can deal with our own.

k1980 – I read somewhere that common air quality measurements in Malaysia have health effects similar to smoking 20-50 cigarettes per day. You don’t have to have H1N1 to be at risk from that!

Even home gardening also need to burn those trash
Not true! I had a small vegetable patch in an ornamental garden in the UK, but the boundary was a hedge made of dense trees. The clippings from the hedge dwarfed the rubbish from the rest of the garden, but all of it went into two compost bins which I was given free by the local council. Open fires are very rare in the residential areas in the UK – there are heavy penalties. The waste disposal companies don’t want green waste, so most people compost it.

The bins are about chest height, like upside-down rubbish bins made of stout dark-coloured recycled plastic, with a lid that isn’t airtight, but stops animals getting into the rubbish. They might be about 2/3cubic metre in volume. They’re open at the bottom. You can put all the peelings from cooking into the bins too (and shredded paper, egg shells, tea bags etc), but no cooked food or meat, as that turns the bins rotten. They have to sit on earth, not on a hard surface. After 3 months or so, the green matter has been converted to fertile black soil by the action of insects, worms and fungus. Every now and again, you can just push the bin over (because it’s wider at the base), shovel aside the black soil and throw the uncomposted waste back into the top of the bin.

The black soil from the base of the compost fin is fine and crumbly, excellent for improving lawns or for enriching soil in a vegetable patch. There’s no pollution, and no need to use fuel to transport waste. A little bit of elbow grease is required: I had a couple of old logs in the garden for chopping the garden waste into smaller pieces to make composting faster. I just sat on one and used an axe to chop on the other – like preparing dinner, only bigger! Some of my older, richer neighbours had powered shredders. You don’t have to put the shreds in the compost, you can throw them straight onto the roots of plants to stop the soil drying too fast in sunny weather.

Home composting really only became widespread in the last ten or fifteen years in the UK, after the council rubbish collections started rejecting green waste. I thought it worked very well, and saved on buying supplements for the garden too. Does anybody do that in Malaysia?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composting

Composting is only good for small areas
I worked for a Knowledge Economy Initiative in the UK briefly before coming to Malaysia. One of the projects I helped out on was a farmer who had diversified into producing fertilisers from incoming waste ‘streams’. Essentially he would pay for or accept for free (because it’s expensive to dispose of waste in the UK) agricultural waste and combine in it vast ‘hot’ compost piles, and then sell the result as fertiliser. We developed some software that used a few measurements from the incoming streams and Operational Research to maximise profit by controlling the relative mixtures of the streams.

Sooner or later, if Malaysia is going to change, some dearly-held beliefs and traditions are going to have to be dispensed with. There are alternative ways of making money (since that seems to be the major concern) from the same resources. Are there not even any government funded research projects looking into alternative models for Malaysian agriculture? I’m not convinced the blame can be laid squarely on farmers. The proposition that we can eat cheaper if we sit choking at our desks, dying earlier from a gruesome respiratory ailment like lung cancer is not convincing.

I was born in Ilford, not long before the 70s! To be fair to the people of Malaysia, the only reason people in the UK use composting bins instead of fly-tipping, burning and hiding garden waste in the household rubbish collection is that burning is mostly illegal and is strictly enforced with hefty penalties and waste disposal was made a very expensive business by legislators. The councils offered to pass on those costs to householders, or provide them with free compost bins. I think the offer was something like ‘recycle it’ or pay an extra RM300 or more per month on waste disposal. Easy choice, huh?

We need to see some effort put into doing something similar by the Malaysian government.