On average, one person in Malaysia produces roughly 1kg of waste per day, made up primarily of domestic waste. That’s nearly 25,000 metric tonnes of domestic waste per day of a population of more than 32 million people. In other words, that’s equivalent to 16.7 million durians. Imagine that!

But what if you could transform part of that waste, even a small amount, into renewable energy? Instead of filling up landfills and contributing to wastage of space, we can now utilise waste from municipal solid and industrial activity to fuel our daily lives. Sounds too good to be true? Dive into the deep dark mass of renewable energy that is biomass.

Currently, Malaysia is very much dependent on coal and natural gas as primary energy sources. However, these fossil fuel sources are finite and will one day run out. To counter the eventual decrease in fossil fuel supply, the country is exploring alternative energy sources. Biomass is just one of those alternative energy resources gaining attention in Malaysia. To further capitalise on existing waste, Universiti Teknologi Petronas together with TNB conducted a research, which proved that bottom ash (a byproduct of coal combustion) can be used to catalyse biomass gasification. This means that a waste product can fuel even more waste products to amazingly produce energy.

To read more on the progress, process and applications of biomass resources in Malaysia, you can refer to this article here.