Md Shahnawaz Khan Chandan

With no segregation and recycling facility, Aminbazar landfill has been struggling to manage daily collection of more than 3,000 tonnes of solid waste.

The landfill, located beside the Dhaka-Aricha highway and around 30km off Zero Point in the capital, is also facing severe shortage of manpower and has only one operational waste management vehicle of its own.

The continuous dumping at the landfill has formed a mountain of garbage, which towers approximately 60 feet above the road.

The Daily Star got the insight of the hard-pressed waste management scenario during a recent visit.

Established with Japanese assistance in 2006, the site was planned as a sanitary landfill. A very few things, however, were done according to the design. The leachate collection pond and treatment plant were non-functional till 2018, while the recycling plant still exists only on paper. There is no heavy equipment to give the daily soil covering.

As there is no manpower for waste segregation and recycling, the landfill authorities allow in hundreds of waste pickers, who collect recyclable materials from the dumped garbage.