Water Pollution- revealing the real polluters

I attended an evening talk yesterday. It was a talk organized by Water Resources Technical Division of IEM. The speaker was YM Tunku Khalkausar Tunku Fathahi, Principal Assistant Director of Department of Environment Malaysia, DOE. The talk begin with the introduction of river basin, function of DOE in river monitoring, classification of rivers, i.e. Class 1 to Class V. We were also presented with water quality data for the year 2009. As expected, the number of rivers in “polluted” category increases by 1% compared to year 2008.

DOE had a programme called River Pollution Prevention and Water Quality Improvement Programme, in short PPPKAS since year 2001. The programme includes detailed study on water quality of selected river basins and action plan to be taken to mitigate and improve the water quality to Class II.

The most important remark by the speaker based on PPPKAS report– Sullage from residential, restaurant, food court, and wet market are the major polluters. So, watch out!! If there is a drain from your house connecting to the drains that flow to the rivers and water from your house flowing into the drains, you are actually polluting the rivers. Speaker also urged all the audiences to come out with ideas or technology to overcome the problems.

The speaker also mentioned that only 10-12% of point source and non-point source identified are under DOE jurisdiction, the balance is under other government agencies mainly the PBT, JPS, land office, DVS, etc. Thus, DOE can only control the polluters under their jurisdiction and in my opinion, control of water quality will be in vain if one of the agencies didn’t play their role.

An integrated planning should be in placed to tackle the water quality issues. So far, DOE only look at the compliance rate of the polluters which I think it is not helping to solve the problem entirely as the pollutants loading will not remain the same when new development is introduced.

I would suggest to DOE to carry out study to predict the maximum pollutants loading along the river basin to the desire Class II and then work together with other government agencies to limit the new development at the area. Besides that, more parameters of pollutants such as heavy metals should be included in deriving the classification of rivers quality. At this moment, only 6 parameters is use. River that has a BOD value that complies to the river classification doesn’t mean that it is safe as it might have high value of heavy metals.

Last but not least, rivers belong to all of us. As a normal citizen, we should also play our role in make sure that our rivers are clean, i.e. use less hair shampoo, use organic kitchen cleaner, divert waters from house to the septic tanks, clean the drainage surrounding us, and inform PBT of clog drains and etc. Ohaiyoo, lets start our duty as “environment protectors” now!