Why are Singaporeans so rubbish at recycling? The experts explain

Singapore has impressive public waste-management systems, but there’s just one problem - its residents aren’t pulling their weight when it comes to household recycling.

The land-scarce Asian city-state generated about 8,400 tonnes of solid waste a day in 2015, but has just one offshore landfill space to bury all its trash. The landfill “island,” called Semakau, was created in 1999 and extended in 2015, with enough space to meet Singapore’s waste disposal needs until at least 2035.

Singapore gets by with so little space for rubbish through an innovative waste management process, in which it recycles about 60 per cent of its solid waste and incinerates 38 per cent of its total waste in waste-to-energy plants. Just 2 per cent of the non-incinerable solid waste and the ash from the incinerator plants are buried in the landfill.

But this isn’t due to a heroic environmental effort from Singaporeans. Households recycled just 19 per cent of their waste in 2015, down from 22 per cent in 2010.

“The lack of awareness and indifference only partly explains the absence of recycling habits [in Singapore] ... In most cases people do not recycle simply because they are not required to do so,” said Tong Yen Wah, co-director of the Energy and Environmental Sustainability Solutions for Megacities programme at the NUS Environmental Research Institute.

Recycling is easy enough in Singapore. There are shared recycling bins at every block on the island’s public housing estates, with a minimum of three weekly collections. Private landed properties have one recycling bin each, with weekly collections.