Matuail 2023
Dhaka's roads feature more than 1.6 million cars—swerving, halting, and of course, always honking. The Matuail landfill offers stark relief from the rest of the city's constant cacophony of horns. The quiet creates an almost unnerving feeling of isolation from the bustle just blocks away.
Yet despite this difference in sound, the landfill shares a key characteristic with the nearby streets laden with the never-ending cycles of buses, rickshaws, and cars: massive amounts of emissions. According to an estimate from April 2021, the 4,000 kilograms of methane gas released from this site every hour equal the environmental damage of an additional 190,000 vehicles to the road. In other words—even amid the absence of honks—Matuail emits enough methane to effectively increase the number of cars in Dhaka by nearly 12 percent.
In June, I had the chance to visit this landfill and speak with members of the local community. The site itself looms as a massive mountain of trash. Although daunting, the heap should be much larger given the size of Dhaka which produces more than 30,000 tons of solid waste per day. More than half of this waste in urban Bangladesh remains uncollected, ending up clogging drains or discarded alongside roads, as I witnessed even a few blocks from the landfill. The 100-acre dump at Matuail constitutes one of two sites in Dhaka and receives the majority of trash—far exceeding its original capacity. As a result, authorities have been forced to dump waste onto mounds far too high (70 feet in some places) or even into a nearby lake.
At first, I had trouble locating the main site, caught in the maze of paths characteristic of the city's dense residential areas. Almost no one I spoke to in the residential area nearby could direct me to the landfill, a testament to how little interaction most people have with the dump despite living just over a kilometer away. Firms engaging in basic industrial production line the street leading up to the main entrance, appearing to operate largely independent of the dump.
At this point, a pair of armed security guards monitoring the gate marked the end of my rickshaw journey. Though they would not let me access the site through this primary road without written confirmation from the city, they kindly pointed out that they couldn't see what I might do if instead I walked around the other side.
This road also played host to a water pump, nominally intended to divert the toxic runoff from the landfill to a proper treatment facility. Contaminated water from garbage dumps poses a serious health threat to those living nearby. As far as I could tell, however, the pump simply moved water across the street into the same type of roadside waterways spanning all slum areas (and as you can see from the photo, the massive holes in the piping meant even achieving that task was aspirational at best).
Walking around out of view of the guards, I saw the first signs of economic activity relying on the site itself. People here sorted through trash to resell it for other uses, and some I spoke with had been doing so for two decades. Women constituted about half of the workers I encountered. These recycling mills form the inspiration for Zareen Tasneem Sharif's "Junior Nobel" prize-winning proposal to revitalize the landfill and treat the existing waste at large scale.
I met some day laborers working to build a road alongside the heaping mounds, as well as a few people who parsed through the garbage itself. Along this side—away from the security guard entrance—the runoff flowed unmanaged. In a sign of the dire environmental conditions, even standing liquid bubbled quite regularly.
All of the people with whom I spoke explained that they had long ago grown accustomed to the environmental impacts of the landfill. They held the view that the quality of their day-to-day experience on the job was to be expected given their state of poverty, engendering a sentiment of acceptance rather than complaint. Without hope for any short-term realization of an "eco town" or similar rejuvenation of the land, the community around Matuail seems stuck with the landfill's sights, smells, and sounds (or lack thereof) for many years to come.
