Today was a slightly different day, since my life nowadays consists of trips to the office, then back home. Instead of going to work this morning, I found myself at the "Environment Building", located within walking distance of Newton MRT. I was going with a colleague to attend some sort of environmental talk, organized for free by the NEA. The speaker was this solid waste management specialist, and the topic was about how this was managed in cities.

Yup, in short, I was going to attend a seminar on rubbish.

I came early, so I decided to explore a bit. The building houses the NEA, the Ministry of Environment and Water Resources, and a third environmental agency I can't recall. The whole ground floor is this huge open space, much like a void deck. A little table was set up in a corner with a sign of the talk next to it. There was not a soul in sight.

I decided I was early (indeed it was 9.15am instead of 9.45am), so I headed upstairs to the second level cafeteria. After a while, I went downstairs, met my colleague, and we waited. We weren't the only ones there. A smattering of people were mulling about, looking out for someone to come down and have them registered.

And so we waited...

And waited...

And waited some more...

However, even with the minute hand inching towards 10.00am, there was still no one from the NEA coming to meet us. In the end, at 10.05am, 2 people finally came down to "open the booth". We signed our names, collected our stickers, then headed for the 25th floor where the function room was.

We came in to find that some of the display materials had yet to be set up, thus another 10 mins elapsed before the talk started. As we sat down, we looked around the room. It smelled musty, and in the words of my colleague.

"Those curtains must be about a hundred years old."

"Yeah," I replied. "They should be in a museum or something."

When the talk started, I personally found the content to be interesting, though a little irrelevant as it covered largely what was happening in Europe, America and India. Slide after slide, we were treated to a visible spectacle of towers of rubbish in open dumps, recycling facilities, shredders and sorters.

I did pay attention, for the most part. In fact, I managed to glean some interesting (to me, I'm a geek) facts.

1) Plastic can be recycled and used as fuel, cos its essentially derived from petroleum. You just have to find a way to systematically sort them into different grades (or gravities as they call it), shred them into tiny bits, then make sure no poisonous gases leak out when you burn them to generate electricity. It is being done in the States and Germany.

2) Food waste in Germany is collected and turned into biofuel. They collect everything from eating places and households, dump it into a giant shredding machine, then blend the whole thing into this pile of brown stuff. The lot goes into a machine that wraps the brown stuff into giant porous bags that resemble long plastic sausages, and are left in an open concrete area. The bags keep in moisture, but keep out odour as air is constantly passed through it. The whole thing is then allowed to decompose further for 40 days. The remnants are collected in containers and used to generate electricity for homes in the winter.

3) In the Netherlands, they actually collect rubbish through suction. Yup. There's this system like ours, with each house linked to a chute. You dump your waste in, it falls to bottom through gravity, but is then sucked to a central collection area by an air pump through tunnels underground. Trucks then come in and remove the waste. They used to have clogs with people dumping bulky items, but after they imposed fines, this problem ceased.

4) Rubbish has been a problem since ancient times. In ancient Greece, they demanded that everyone dump their rubbish at least a mile outside the city of Athens.

5) In India, like many other parts of the world, it is not uncommon to find animals rummaging through open dumps. Thats all well and good, but some of them are livestock that are eventually slaughtered and shipped to other parts of the country and sold as meat. And the thing is, these prized pigs are guarded. If you attempt to drive them away from the dumps, you'll have an issue with the owners.

6) When Germany was still divided, West Germany shipped waste and sent it to East Germany to be disposed of (with payment). What the West Germans didn't realize was that this waste was being dumped and buried haphazardly in mines near the Berlin Wall. After reunification, Germany collectively found that it had major pollution problem and spent millions cleaning up the waste.
All this was informative, but I still hadn't any idea of how big cities like NY or Mumbai dealt with their solid waste. The examples were a little limited, though it did teach me a little something.

After that, headed back to the office, da bao-ed lunch, then rushed back to my work.

At the end of the work day, headed down to Gluttons Bay at Esplanade to eat. I could detect the presence K.F Seetoh as I glanced up at the huge Makansutra logos plastered all over the umbrellas and on the plates. The prawn noodles there are pretty decent. After that, went over to NTUC to buy an iron since ours broke down, or as my mum put it, "not hot oreaddy".

And there at NTUC, I almost burst out laughing.

For next to the regular, Panasonic irons, was a spanking new brand of irons called Pensonic!

The logos were similar, though Pensonic was in pink while Panasonic was in its signature dark blue.

I expect we're going to see new brands like iMah, Mikey Mouse and Kucci soon.