Tackling the green hypocrisy in Malaysia

Malaysian policymakers love to flaunt green initiatives such as banning plastic bags at supermarkets and stalls. Perhaps that is where the hypocrisy begins, writes university student Irham Zulkernain.

Malaysia consumes the most single-use plastic in Southeast Asia, at 16.78kg of packaging plastic per person annually. That troubling statistic is well known among ordinary Malaysians.

Policymakers love to flaunt green initiatives such as banning plastic bags at supermarkets and stalls, while ‘encouraging’ people to bring their own containers for takeaway food. Perhaps that is where the hypocrisy begins.

As a varsity student, I am well versed in such theatrical displays of ‘initiative’. The institution I attend utilises a merit-based system in which students earn points to apply for residential colleges for the following semester. These points are awarded through participation in activities organised by student organisations and the university.

In my first semester alone, I took part in at least two environment-centred programmes. One involved collecting plastic bottles for recycling in exchange for merit points. On paper, it was a win-win for everyone: fewer plastic bottles discarded, more materials recycled and more merit points for participants.

Yet the programmes overlooked a glaring contradiction. They were designed to reduce plastic waste, but bottled water remained freely available throughout the events.

My objection is not to bottled water because the bottles are made of plastic. Rather, it is to initiatives that present themselves as environmentally responsible while making little meaningful effort towards genuine sustainability.

The student organisations behind these programmes are not at fault. They have no control over facilities budgets or infrastructure procurement. Their only lever is programming, so what they produce is naturally symbolic rather than structural. Responsibility ultimately lies with those who control the funding and can finance bottle drives but not install water dispensers.

The obvious defence would be that bottled water is cheaper and easier for the university to provide than water dispensers. Bottled water requires no plumbing, filtration units, maintenance contracts or repairs. A vending machine or bottled-water rack is a service the university can outsource entirely, whereas a dispenser is an asset it must own and maintain. Viewed this way, the imbalance appears less like hypocrisy than the path of least administrative resistance.

That defence, however, collapses under its own logic. If cost were genuinely the issue, the university would not simultaneously fund recycling drives, merit-point programmes and environmental campaign banners, all of which require money, manpower and administrative resources.

A water dispenser is a one-off capital investment that can serve students for years. A bottle collection campaign, by contrast, is a recurring expense that leaves little behind once the semester ends beyond a spreadsheet of merit points. If the administration can afford the latter, the claim that it cannot afford the former reflects not a lack of funds but a preference for the kind of sustainability that photographs well over the kind that genuinely reduces consumption.

Nor is this unique to campus life. It reflects the default approach to sustainability in Malaysia: initiatives that appeal to good intentions without producing meaningful structural change. I remember watching television as a child when the government aired public service announcements encouraging people visiting pasar malam to bring their own containers. I am now an adult, yet single-use plastic remains the norm across the country.

It is little wonder, then, that Malaysia leads Southeast Asia in single-use plastic consumption. When environmentalism is largely symbolic, meaningful results remain elusive.

A nation’s sustainability cannot depend solely on the goodwill of consumers or the enthusiasm of student volunteers. It must be built into the physical and economic infrastructure of the places we inhabit.

Until governments and university administrations alike are willing to invest in structural alternatives, their green initiatives will remain what they largely are: theatrical displays designed to manage optics rather than waste.

Irham Zulkernain is a Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) student at Universiti Teknologi MARA.