JOHOR BAHRU, Feb 23 (NNN-BERNAMA) — Pasir Gudang is now equipped with a system, worth RM6.9 million,\u00a0 that is capable of detecting harmful pollutants in\u00a0the air to provide early warning in the event of any contamination, making it the first \u00a0industrial city in the country\u00a0to have the facility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Energy, Science, Technology, Environment and Climate Change Minister Yeo Bee Yin said the system would monitor the air quality in real time to provide early warning in the event of an air pollution incident.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Air Pollution Early Warning System is equipped with an alarm to detect hazardous pollutants in the air that will directly alert enforcement officers at the Department of Environment (DOE) in the event of air pollution to enable immediate action over the source of the pollution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt involves the installation of 25 Photoionisation Detector (PID) stations in 25 locations, including schools around Pasir Gudang, and six units of Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR), as well as two units of portable Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) and Gas Chromatography-Flame Ionisation Detector (GC-FID),\u201d she told a press conference at the Pasir Gudang DOE branch, here today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Earlier, Yeo, accompanied by the ministry\u2019s deputy secretary-general (Environment and Climate Change) Dr Nagulendran; State Local Government, Urban Wellbeing and Environment Committee chairman Tan Chen Choon; DOE director-general Norlin Jaafar and state DOE director Mohd Famey Yusoff, visited the PID station at the Pasir Gudang Municipal Council Stadium here to observe its operation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yeo said the government, in its efforts to avoid a recur of the \u00a0Sungai Kim Kim pollution incident\u00a0 in March last year, had taken various steps\u00a0to increase industrial monitoring in the area and the installation of the early pollution warning system was one of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If the system proved successful, it would be extended to other industrial areas in the country, she added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The public, she said, is also expected to get information from the system through the DOE website beginning the second quarter of this year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a related development, Yeo said the DOE had intensified its enforcement on factories and industrial premises in Pasir Gudang to ensure their compliance with the law and regulations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She said that\u00a0a total of 664 inspections were carried out last year, compared with 460 premises in the previous year.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The government would not compromise with environmental criminals, she said, adding that the suspect in the Sungai Kim Kim pollution\u00a0incident had been charged in court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Besides enforcement action, Yeo said, DOE also carries out monitoring through online systems such as industrial effluent discharge quality through Online Environmental Reporting (OER) and scheduled waste disposal through the Electronic Schedule Waste Information System (E-SWIS).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The system is able to detect the movement of scheduled waste from the industry to the DOE-licensed processing or disposal facilities, she added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She said monitoring by drones had\u00a0also been carried out since Oct 23, to quickly detect any possible pollution\u00a0and sources of contamination so that early preventive measures can be taken.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
— NNN-BERNAMA<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
JOHOR BAHRU, Feb 23 (NNN-BERNAMA) — Pasir Gudang is now equipped with a system, worth RM6.9 million,\u00a0 that is capable of detecting harmful pollutants in\u00a0the air to provide early warning in the event of any contamination, making it the first \u00a0industrial city in the country\u00a0to have the facility. Energy, Science, Technology, Environment and Climate Change […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":63033,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[288,300,318],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63032"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63032\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/63033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}