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Industry Spotlight & Innovation
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to be sufficiently comprehensive to ensure that NEWSandTM can be used anywhere in the country without compromising the water quality. This also means that we would not have to track NEWSandTM's applications, as it would be treated like any other construction material. It may have lengthened the development of NEWSandTM as a product, but this makes for a long-term solution that fits our local construction and environment landscape.
Exciting plans for
NEWSandTM in 2020
2020 will be an exciting year. NEA, in collaboration with the LTA and the Public Utilities Board (PUB), will soon begin a field trial to assess the environmental impact of treated IBA as road base and sub-base materials at Tanah Merah Coast Road. Three companies – Blue Phoenix, Remex Minerals Singapore and Zerowaste Asia – will be collecting and treating around 3,000 tonnes of IBA generated from the waste-to- energy plants in Singapore, for use as road base and sub-base materials at the said road. Slag, a validated form of NEWSandTM, is currently produced by the Nanyang
Technological University’s (NTU) Waste- to-Energy Research Facility (WTERF) from Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) at Tuas South. Unlike IBA, slag does not need to be treated, as it is inert and does not pose the same leaching problems as untreated IBA. The 105-metre footpath at Our Tampines Hub, and the 3D -printed concrete bench unveiled on 25 November 2019 by Minister for the Environment and Water Resources (EWR) Masagos Zulkifli, bear testament to the feasibility of slag-based NEWSandTM as a replacement for fine aggregates.
Shifting sands
In Singapore, the only constant is change. Infrequent visitors to Singapore often marvel at how different the nation-state is compared to their last visit. The skyline of the Central Business District looks nothing like that from just twenty years ago, and our port is due to move from Pasir Panjang to Tuas to become bigger and better by 2040 (Koh, 2019). It is counter-intuitive that a city that changes so much, so quickly, would take such a long-term approach to land use and urban planning. One might perhaps reason that it is precisely this deliberative