Amin Bazar
The Amin Bazar Landfill is to the north of Dhaka, just off the Dhaka-Aricha highway. The Dhaka city corporation established the landfill in 2006, when the area was still predominantly wetlands, paddy fields, and rural homesteads. Today, the rapidly growing city has expanded into the area. The highway is clogged with cars and lined with shopping malls and gas stations. Patches of farmland and wetland remain, although they are being fast replaced by garment factories and brick kilns. The sixty-feet high mountain of rotting garbage looms over this urbanizing and industrializing landscape, dominating sight and smell.
The landfill was originally scheduled to be abandoned, dressed with top soil and returned to the other uses, in 2017. Its lifespan was extended to 2023, with the decision to raise the height of 16 acres at the centre of the fill to sixty feet, giving the landfill its shape of a small hill with a flat top and steep slopes. Its lifespan may well be extended again. The Dhaka North City Corporation is acquiring land adjacent to the fill and has recently commissioned a waste-to-energy power plant to be constructed by the China Machine Engineering Corporation.
I visited the Amin Bazar waste site this year with a colleague and students from Georgetown University, on a tour of Dhaka city. We were the guests of the Dhaka North City Corporation, in charge of managing the waste site. In an airconditioned conference room in the landfill’s offices that did not keep out the smell or the flies, Mohammad Farid, the DNCC engineer in charge of the landfill, gave us a presentation on the challenges of managing a decomposing mountain of organic waste that belches gases and seeps liquids. The methane frequently combusts, starting spontaneous fires in different parts of the dump that need to be put out. The viscous, black liquid – known as leachate - that leaks out from the fill has to be collected before it can run into the groundwater and the local water system. The challenges of fighting fires and containing leachate become especially acute during the monsoon rains.
The Bangladeshi press has reported extensively on how the Amin Bazar waste site has wrought ecological devastation upon the locality, destroying the health and livelihoods of thousands of people (here, here, here, and here). For a more comprehensive report, on the management of Dhaka city’s two landfills (Amin Bazar for Dhaka North, and Matuail in Dhaka South), I recommend Salma Akhter Urme et. al.’s article in Buildings and Cities here.
I want to reflect, however, with the 1800 Histories project, on Amin Bazar as a point in a constellation of methane-emitting sites strung out across the world. I would like to make two points. First, landfills are planned concentrations of global capital, whose history can be explored through scientific ideas of urban waste management and the funding decisions of institutions of international aid and development. Amin Bazar, like the Matuail landfill, was built with financing and technical assistance from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), who is now funding Amin’s Bazar expansion, even as the CMEC begins work on a waste-to-energy power plant. (For a 2010 evaluation of JICA’s initial project funding see here). Second, landfills are breathing, heaving, seething entities, not inert objects. A mountain of organic waste, compacting under its own weight and undergoing complex chemical and biological processes of decomposition, is a difficult entity to predict, manage, and control. It is prone to spontaneous fires and to spilling over its boundaries. The history of the landfill is also the history of chemicals, molecules, and bacteria and the complex processes of decomposition and decay.
The mountain of waste viewed from the Dhaka-Aricha highway is a splotch of methane on the planet’s surface when seen from a satellite in orbit. Satellite-based global methane emission reports identifying Amin Bazar as an ultra-emitting site caused a stir in Bangladesh. Government officials have responded by expressing doubts regarding the reliability of satellite data, while at the same time promoting foreign aid and investment in urban waste management to combat climate change (here and here). The 300 million US$ waste-to-energy powerplant in Amin Bazar is justified in the language of climate change and the reduction in methane emissions. The view from space is already reshaping Amin Bazar’s landscape and history.
