So have mysterious bags of cash and the relics of witch-doctor experiments, such as herbs and animal skulls. Human body parts have shown up in the trash heap. As Olusosun has grown, it has become associated with the city’s darker side.
Other workers have fallen ill of unidentified diseases. In the past, some garbage pickers have died or lost limbs when the dump trucks’ hydraulics failed and the vehicles’ containers crashed down on them. Thousands of people work at the Lagos dumpsite, and many live amid the trash. They will then sell those to middlemen, part of a long chain of commercial activity that typically ends on a barge, with recyclable materials on their way to China to be melted and turned into bottles, sandals or clothes.Ī man carries water to his home at Olusosun. When trucks arrive, crowds of men with iron bars and plastic bags pounce on the back, convinced that the most aggressive workers will get the most valuable materials, such as metal cans and plastic bottles. Today, more than 4,000 people work there, living in tentlike structures atop the trash. The government has announced that it will shut down Olusosun by 2022. "It's an eyesore," Lagos's environment minister, Babatunde Adejare, said in an interview. The dump is a dystopian sight, a tower of garbage 10 stories tall with an endless stream of trucks arriving to unload heaps of waste. Perhaps nowhere are the dangers and opportunities of trash so clear as in Olusosun, by far the biggest of the city’s landfills. Across the city, local entrepreneurs and international businesses have opened sorting and recycling plants that export plastics, metals and paper to China and India. It is a city where waste has become an enormous public policy challenge, a source of grave diseases but also a valuable commodity. Still, if Lagos is a symbol of the worst reactions to the world’s garbage problems, it also represents some of the best solutions. We have no other land to live on,” said Ibrahim Abadu, 42, a Bariga resident. Earlier this year, a flood swept tons of garbage from the city’s lagoons into some of its main streets. Children play barefoot in the trash that hasn’t been covered yet. Walking on Bariga’s reclaimed land feels like balancing on a trampoline, the ground sinking slightly beneath your feet with each step. They took the trash and extended their property into the bay, covering it with sawdust and building homes on top. Residents of one community, Bariga, agreed a few years ago to allow garbage collectors to use their neighborhood as a dumpsite. With the population surging, some of the city's coastal slums had run out of usable land and started filling in swampy areas with rubbish. The city’s garbage problem had become impossible to conceal. The Olusosun landfill, the largest in Lagos, was once well outside the city limits, but as the population of Lagos has exploded, the city has expanded around it. In August, Nigeria’s Guardian newspaper ran the headline “Epidemic looms in Lagos over piling heaps of waste.” This year, Lagos has had two outbreaks of Lassa fever, a sometimes deadly virus, spread by rodent urine or feces, that has been linked to poor sanitation. Every year, improper garbage disposal contributes to devastating epidemics of mosquito-borne malaria, yellow fever and other potentially fatal diseases.
GARBAGE TRUCK DRIVER SALARY FULL
By 2025, according to a World Bank study, the waste produced by cities around the globe will be enough to fill a line of rubbish trucks 3,100 miles long every day.Īfrica, the fastest-urbanizing continent, is full of cities struggling to balance their extraordinary growth with sustainable waste management. The world's garbage crisis - documented over two years by photographer Kadir van Lohuizen - is predicted to grow exponentially in the coming decades as people become richer and increasingly move to urban areas. In Jakarta, residents refer to the Indonesian city's growing dump simply as "the Mountain." In the Netherlands, which has a sophisticated recycling system, residents throw away the equivalent of more than 400,000 loaves of bread per day. In New York, barges transport as much as 3,600 tons of waste down the Hudson River every day. The world now produces more than a billion tons of garbage a year, which it incinerates and buries and exports and recycles. It is directly off the main highway, and a whiff of burning trash sometimes blows across the city’s standing traffic jams. Lagos has expanded well beyond Olusosun, and the cavernous dump now finds itself in the center of the city, a hospital on one side, a primary school on another, and homes hovering just over its precipice.
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