facilities at Tuas and Senoko, with a combined daily capacity of 7,900 tonnes. 4 But despite these developments there was no forestalling the inevitable. Landfills continue to fill up with incinerated ash and a desperate need arose for new space to store spent waste. With the last remaining landfill on Singapore’s mainland at Lorong Halus slated to close in 1999, this tropical, land-scarce country faced a crisis of wasteful proportions; the only option, the NEA felt, was offshore. 5 The world’s first offshore landfill created entirely from new sea space, Semakau landfill is a staggering example of a modern waste ideology driven to its technological limits. Effectively re-enacting in just three decades the aspirations of most Western countries since their industrialisation, Singapore’s remarkable transformation foreshadows several unanswered questions surrounding these new waste practices. If ‘good’ environmental behaviour rests on the belief that waste and wasting are fundamentally unsound environmental practices, what does it signify now that waste and wasting are being re-employed to create new ecologies, energy sources and even social programming? With the landfill at Semakau slated to become a protected marine park, we might, at this point, revisit the observations of Marcel Mauss in his 1923 study of exchange and debt in Pacific Island societies where he looked specifically at the Haida and Kwakiutl potlatch as a system that governs the transference of wealth within and between communities. 6 Mauss observed three basic rules that governed archaic exchange practices: the need to gift, the need to accept gifts, and the obligation to repay. And although he views these forms of exchange as fundamentally different from his own modern money economy – since to be modern, according to Mauss, is also to be individualistic – many critics since Marx have argued (and the events of 2008 succinctly shown), individual participants in a money economy are no less susceptible to the temperaments of a total system; one whose prestations are no longer ‘gifts’ but an intricate relationship struck between consumption and production that works – like gift giving – to ensure its own perpetuation. 7
Despite a surfeit of enthusiasm over Semakau’s technical and ecological prowess, Singapore’s bid to eliminate waste by burning it up and burying it beneath the surface of the ocean raises a vexing set of social questions. By muddying the distinction between waste and gain, Singapore’s example casts serious doubt on waste’s current ‘crisis’ dimension by showing instead how waste can be economically, socially and even environmentally productive ; refuting at the same time a legacy of criticism and hard won gains against wasting behaviours – from the high pitch of 1960s environmental activism to our present ethos of sustainability 2 – by appearing to endorse pleasure and excess as a form of environmentalism. The saying goes that Singapore is a ‘fine’ city: importing chewing gum into the country you risk a fine of S$1,000; vandalism, $5,000; smoking in a public place, $1,000; littering, $1,000; and (if you are crass enough to do so, and to be caught) not flushing a public toilet will set you back $250 [S$1 = C$.80]. Not just a clever t-shirt slogan, the country’s well-deserved moniker points to the fact that this densely populated country of immense wealth maintains at the same time a superclean sensibility. As Southeast Asia’s premier shopping destination, Singapore’s current war against waste is the result of its rampant modernisation and the price of its prideful entry into a pantheon of globalised western nations. As recently as the 1970s however, with garbage cast indiscriminately into waterways, cluttering the streets and exiting open brick fireplaces in thick curls of black smoke, Singapore presented a very different scene. With municipal garbage collection performed by handcart, dumping relegated to swamps and wetlands, refuse piled up along roads and in alleyways attracting flies, cockroaches and rates, and with the tropical heat working to produce a deplorable stench, the country’s own NEA describes its late modern, waste history as a ‘primitive affair’. 3 With the country’s few landfills nearing capacity by 1970, a tremendous effort was mounted by public authorities to implement a sophisticated and costly waste regime, completing in 1979, at Ulu Pandan, the first waste-to-energy facility in Asia outside Japan and expanding by 2009 to include four incineration
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dustin valen
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