Residents say the pocket park – one of 10 across Dhaka, with more waiting to be unveiled – provides a welcome oasis in a city creaking under the weight of its own urban sprawl.
The parks provide mere thumbnails of green in such a densely packed city, but with cartoonists commissioned to decorate them, they indicate a willingness among the powers-that-be to raise the quality of life in Dhaka by involving small communities.
Yet with so many people also comes rubbish. Great mountains of it. Garbage piles up across many of the city’s streets, blocking canals and occupying the empty spaces under bridges and pathways – shapeless eruptions of discarded bags of crisps, used nappies and the food wrappings that are tossed from car windows with little regard for who will ultimately have to pick it up.
That responsibility rests with the city’s two municipal corporations, Dhaka North and Dhaka South, whose service offerings include attacking the abundance of waste that is generated in the capital every day. But critics say the task of handling such a fetid ocean of refuse in a city already bursting at its seams has proved to be beyond the authorities’ abilities.
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“Waste management in this city is practically nonexistent, we have never attempted to manage the waste problem here,” said prominent environmental activist Sharif Jamil of the Bangladesh Poribesh Andolon (Bangladesh Environment Movement). “What we do is incredibly messy and I’m not sure we can call it management.”
Household and other waste is collected from Dhaka’s residential areas then brought to so-called secondary transfer stations, often located on busy roads, where the overwhelming stench of rotting garbage under the hot sun forces pedestrians to cover their noses as they pass.
There is no process for separating electronic waste from conventional garbage, and medical waste often gets thrown in with the rest of the rubbish as well.
According to reports published by the city’s two municipal authorities, they collected some 1.93 million tonnes of waste in 2019-2020 – an estimated 80 per cent of the total generated – which was then dumped in one of the only two landfill sites that serve the fast-growing mega-city.
Dhaka’s trash turmoil
Roughly 12km north of central Dhaka lies the Aminbazar landfill. Established in 2007, it has served ever since as the final destination for an increasing amount of the city’s waste.
Mohammad Alal, 55, finished building his home a few hundred metres away from the landfill on what he remembers as idyllic arable land the same year that it opened.
“During summer, it was lush and green, the paddy fields looked stunning. The monsoon used to turn this place into a shallow but scenic water body,” he recalled.
Now, all is overshadowed by the ever-growing heap of trash that is Aminbazar – fed by a steady flow of trucks that constantly stream in and out, adding to the landfill’s height and length. As hawks and crows circle overhead, excavators and workers sort through the garbage, crush it and pile it into mounds.
Summers here are nightmarish, thanks to the stench and clouds of dust, while June through October brings monsoon rains that flush germ-filled, fetid water off the landfill and onto the surrounding land and into neighbourhoods.
“When the wind blows, a rotten, pungent smell comes to this area,” Alal said. “I have lived here for so many years, yet I’m still not used to it.”
Toxic heavy metals such as lead, mercury and arsenic leach into the surrounding soil from the landfill, with researchers at Dhaka’s Jahangirnagar University finding levels in the surface and groundwater that far exceeded safe limits.
Bangladesh’s Department of Public Health Engineering, which is responsible for providing and maintaining water and sewage lines in the country, sets a limit for drinking water of 1,000 milligrams per litre of total dissolved solids (TDS) – a measure of water quality based on the combined content of all dissolved inorganic and organic substances.
[In Bangladesh] we don’t usually do segregation of waste at the household level. Everything, including batteries and broken devices, go in our household trash
Landfills are prone to discharge toxicity into the environment via leachate – the name for contaminated liquid that has percolated through the trash – which then seeps out of the bottom of unsealed garbage dumps, said Shafi Mohammad Tareq, an environmental-science professor at Jahangirnagar University and a co-author of the study.
“The leachate contains various contaminants,” he said. “[In Bangladesh] we don’t usually do segregation of waste at the household level … Everything, including batteries and broken devices, go in our household trash, and they could contain cadmium, chromium and other toxic substances.
“They end up in landfills with other municipal waste. And through the leachates, they spread into the environment.”
At Matuail, the other massive landfill serving the Bangladeshi capital that’s under the administration of the South City Corporation, researchers found TDS readings that were even higher.
Climate clouds future
Much of the strain on Dhaka’s infrastructure comes from its rapidly growing population, many of whom have migrated to urban areas from farms in one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to climate change.
A World Bank report in October last year forecast that Bangladesh would have more than 13 million internal climate migrants by 2050 – most of them Dhaka-bound. With more residents, the mega-city faces exponentially growing challenges to address its waste management problem.
If the influx of people is inevitable, environmental activist Jamil suggests that policymakers make the city’s burgeoning population part of the solution.
“Waste could be an asset and the big population could be a huge source of resources rather than just a burden,” Jamil said.
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“Many people’s livelihoods depend on collected municipal waste. They resell and recycle a lot of stuff found in the garbage. If we can streamline it [the recycling process], by involving the community, waste extraction would be lessened. Waste could also be turned into fuel, power and fertiliser.”
Bangladesh is already making moves to extract more utility from its waste, with the country’s first waste-to-energy power plant set for completion in the Aminbazar landfill next year, under a 2021 agreement with China Machinery Engineering Corporation, a subsidiary of the state-owned China National Machinery Industry Corporation. Once operational, the plant is expected to generate 42.5MW of electricity per hour while operating at full capacity.Dhaka South is planning a similar project at the Matuail landfill. Authorities are currently negotiating a deal with a Chinese company for a 50MW waste-to-energy power plant.
But there’s still a mountain of trash to climb before the issue is solved.
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“The impact of this problem is very chronic,” said Tareq, the environmental-science professor. “The impacts of unmanaged waste will contribute to and worsen the plethora of other problems we already suffer, like air pollution. Landfills are already leaking methane and other toxic gases.”
Both municipal service providers have developed “New Clean Dhaka” master plans for solid waste management, with support from the Japan International Cooperation Agency – the Japanese government’s international development agency. As part of the initiative, authorities aim to achieve an “environmentally advanced city with integrated and sustainable solid waste management” that will one day generate “zero waste” through the “3R” approach – reduce, reuse and recycle.Yet environmental activist Jamil expressed doubt over the efficacy of such plans, due to historically poor coordination between Bangladesh’s government agencies and the exclusion of the wider community when the plans were being drawn up.
“The old ones [waste management plans] didn’t work. These ones will also not work because they’re not practical and they don’t take the main actors – the common people, not the enforcers – into consideration,” he said.
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“We have to change people’s mindset first, it’s a long-term game and we are not doing anything about it.”
In the meantime, the misery continues for the likes of Noyontara Begum, a widow who lives in a slum in Dhaka’s Mohammadpur neighbourhood.
As she prepares lunch on a makeshift platform across a stinky, ink-black canal clogged with rubbish, a woman walks out carrying a plastic bucket of household waste and throws it into the thick, dark sludge, which during the annual monsoon season overflows into the surrounding slums.
“They [the authorities] haven’t given people any better alternatives to throw away their trash.” she told This Week in Asia. “People see a dirty place and they make it even dirtier.”
*Surname withheld to protect child’s identity
