Payatas Landfill

IN SUMMARY

Payatas is a barangay located in the 2nd district of Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines.

It is divided into three local government areas called barangays in the Philippines. They are known simply as the Payatas A, B, C. Payatas is the only barangay established under judiciary rule. Despite the poor access and lack of services and facilities, these areas continue to attract a large number of informal settlers from various areas of Metro Manila.

In the 1970s, Metro Manila began dumping waste in Payatas, a 30-hectare open landfill located at the northern part of Quezon City. The name Payatas is derived from “Payat Sa Taas”, which translated, means, “infertile soil in upper area”. As the volume of waste grew, so did the scavengers and houses. Most of the children were not in school, and largely worked as scavengers to provide for themselves and their families. Payatas has become famous for trash and poverty at its worst.

In the 1970s, the area was merely a ravine that was surrounded by farming villages and rice paddies. Now, Payatas houses a 50-acre landfill which earns it the name "second Smokey Mountain".

Payatas dumpsite is still the largest open dumpsite in the Philippines and was reopened only months after the 2000 disaster at the request of scavengers and other residents of the area who depend on it for their livelihood.

PAYATAS TRAGEDY

The Payatas landslide was a garbage dump collapse at Payatas, Quezon City, Philippines, on July 10, 2000, that officially killed around 218 people and left thousands of people homeless. Many eyewitnesses note the number of people who died is much greater though, up to 1,000. A typhoon and unstable ground culminated in an avalanche of garbage crashing over the flimsy houses. The massive landslide left over 300 hundred dead, and entire families wiped out. The incident made international headlines, causing embarrassment for the Philippines government and prompting officials to shut down the dumpsite.

In 2001, the Quezon City government reopened Payatas, this time with the goal of converting it into a controlled disposal facility. Former Mayor Feliciano “Sonny” Belmonte turned to IPM Environmental Services in 2004 to help the city accomplish its mission.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF PAYATAS

CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE SOLID WASTE DISPOSAL FACILITY IN PAYATAS

CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC POLICIES IN PAYATAS

CLICK HERE FOR FULL TRANSCRIPTS OF INTERVIEWS WITH PAYATAS RESIDENTS

GETTING TO KNOW PAYATAS

In the words of one of our members

The second place we visited in Manila was the Payatas Landfill. We didn’t get to spend a lot of time in the landfill, and although we had close to no preparation made prior to visiting the landfill, and spent not more than five hours onsite, to me the landfill was the most memorable, impactful, emotion-inducing part of the trip for me. I wasn’t expecting much before we went to the landfill, because we heard that we wouldn’t be able to visit the landfill site itself since it was closed off to the public. I was, however, really looking forward to the landfill because I had done a bit of reading after the EOYs, and the place is really something. As a community they’ve been through a lot over the years, including a particularly devastating tragedy that happened in 2001, when there was a landslide that killed more than 300 families. Since then the government has poured in massive amounts of capital and research to convert the landfill into an ecological waste management facility employing state-of-the-art technology and drawing from extensive expertise across all fields of discipline. I think what really drew me to the place, however, was how similar it was to Smokey Mountain, which was a topic I onerously devoted about two weeks of my time to when we had to write an essay about it for IH in Sec 3. There is a fundamental difference between reading about something in a textbook and actually seeing it for yourself, and I learned the true extent of this difference when we visited Payatas.

Driving into Payatas was comparable to driving through Manila and getting shell-shocked by the urban slums on our first day. Certainly, I was less surprised by the state of the environment as I was when we first emerged from the airport, even though I was now close up and in proximity to it. While we sped past the settlements on the first day, we were now driving through the narrow streets of the slum at a pace comparable to an amble, and I could see, up-close, the details on the houses with their tin roofs and haphazard laundry and peeling paint, as well as their inhabitants sitting idly on the sides of the roads. Again there was a lot to take in, but we had been in the Philippines for 17 days, and images like these were no longer a novelty, and the state of living was an unavoidable truth that I came to accept after spending a long time observing and understanding how these communities lived and worked.

When we first alighted from the van and were immediately ushered into this well-furnished office, where we were made to watch two corporate videos on the development of Payatas. This segment was led by some governmental and corporate officials. What I really wanted to hear, however, was the voices of the community, so when it was later announced that we were allowed to make a quick visit to the junk shop area to speak to some of the owners there, I was beyond exhilarated. It was during that time that we were allowed to talk to some of the people there, and those short conversations that we held were both insightful and sobering in equal measure.

I spoke to a scavenger, whom we called Kuya, a father of six children who had moved from central Manila to Payatas in the hope of leading a more peaceful life and obtain a stable job to provide for his family. He was a serious, quiet-looking man, with a neutral, tanned face carved with lines and callused hands that he always held interlinked and placed on his lap. His wife had passed on a few years ago, his children all grown up, and they lived in a small room along the streets that we had driven into. I didn’t really know how to start the conversation, sitting across him as he leaned against the wall in a green sleeved shirt and staring at the six of us rather nervously. After all we were sitting in a cramped, dark walkway just outside the small room he lived in. I imagine it must have been quite a claustrophobic experience, watching the six of us staring at him in expectation, with our translator at his side, listening to strangers speaking to him in a foreign language and asking him questions about his life. I asked the only thing that came to my mind at that point in time, and that was “What is life like in Payatas?”. It was a simple question, I thought to myself at that point, but in restrospect I realise that the answer was huge, daunting and complicated. The translator translated.

He started to say something, then stopped, looked around, hands crossed together, silent as though he was trying to formulate his thoughts or think of something to say. It was a long silence, and it wasn’t long before we realised that he was crying.

Honestly I was at a loss. Shocked because I never anticipated such a reaction, terrified because I didn’t know how to respond or what to do or what he was even trying to tell us, and guilty because I didn’t know if my question had offended him somehow. There was stunned silence among the six of us, sitting in the dim alley watching a grown man break down into tears, before he could even utter a word in response.

Someone handed some tissue to him.

I really didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know what to tell the translator to help us say and the translator didn’t say anything either. We just watched him in silence as he collected himself and then started saying something in Tagalog.

“Life is too hard,” I remember the translator saying in between his pauses, conveying to us his words in English, “thinking about it makes him sad.”

It was a simple answer that said more than it had to in a few words.

CAPSTONE PHILIPPINES