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   Industry Spotlight and Innovation
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Concrete Results: This completed footpath opposite Our Tampines Hub, which links to the Darul Ghufran Mosque, is made from concrete incorporated with municipal solid waste slag.
03 NTU NEA Waste to Energy Research Facility at Tuas South. Image Credit: NTU Singapore
04 Bench Strength: Measuring 80 by 105 by 60cm, and weighing some 560 kg, this bench was made out of slag derived from municipal solid waste, mixed with concrete, via a 3D printing process.
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all of the municipal solid waste from the NTU campus, and turns it into slag, a glasslike material, via a high-temperature gasification process. The process also produces metal granulates and synthetic gas, both of which are easily recoverable and, more importantly, reusable.
Crucially, the slag has since been assessed to meet all the necessary requirements to be qualified as NEWSand. This was announced by Minister Masagos on 25 November, in an event that marked the successful closure of the Year Towards Zero Waste. Unveiled at the event was a bench made out of this slag that had been derived from municipal solid waste. Prior to that, a footpath had already been completed using such slag, at Our Tampines Hub.
Minister added that the NEA and partner agencies would be embarking on field trials of other forms of NEWSand, this time made from incineration bottom ash, from the second half of 2020.
2020 Foresight?
Looking Beyond
In the meantime, research and development needs to continue apace in waste management, not least because the waste streams we produce will continue to evolve. As more and newer materials get invented and incorporated into the products that we consume, so it follows that the compositions of our waste streams would continue to evolve.
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 Left to our own devices
Let us take e-waste as an example. It was not too long ago that Bill Gates, soon after founding Microsoft, had set out the compelling vision of “a computer on every desk” for his employees. Barely a few decades on, due to the further efforts of tech giants like Apple and Samsung, we now have an even more powerful computer each (and likely several more), be it in the form of a smartphone or tablet, literally in our hands. Many more elements, especially rare-earth metals, go into making such electronic products today, compared to mainly silicon and a few other elements that had gone into their deskbound predecessors. The e-waste that we get today is a dual-edged sword, in that while it is more difficult and costly to treat, there are also more precious resources to be recovered from such treatment.
In mid-2019, the risk of rare-earth elements being used as a bargaining chip had heightened, as trade tensions worsened between China and the United States. As such, the recoverability of such materials from our e-waste matters to you and me, in more ways than one.
Staying on the geopolitical front, the last few years had seen China, Malaysia and other countries banning plastic waste imports, citing the severe impact to their respective natural environments hitherto. While the global waste management industry continues to react to – some would say, reel from – such developments, there
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should be more market impetus towards decentralised and in situ waste treatment systems and solutions. This is as more cities and countries worldwide are compelled to take their waste management matters into their own hands.
Singapore is thus hardly on our own, in terms of addressing the waste management challenge, even if we would typically feel such challenges most keenly, given our oft- mentioned land and resource constraints. To turn waste to resource, and constraint to opportunity, calls for the public, academic and industrial sectors to continue to work closely, hand in hand.
1 The event was witnessed by Senior Minister of State for the Environment and Water Resources, Dr Amy Khor, and covered in Issue 16 of this magazine.
2 Urban Solutions and Sustainability (USS) is part of the Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2020 plan to develop a knowledge-based innovation driven economy and society. Specifically, the USS aims to enhance our living environment and address our resource constraints through an interdisciplinary approach.
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