The Sweep

Every morning, Davao City performs a quiet ritual.

Before dawn, garbage trucks wind through neighborhoods, markets, and business districts, lifting black plastic bags from curbsides while most of its 1.8 million residents are still asleep. Street sweepers follow behind, brushing away leaves, wrappers, and dust until little remains of the previous day’s waste. By sunrise, the streets are clean again, and the city awakens seemingly untouched by the garbage it produced only hours before.

For decades, this routine has helped shape Davao City’s identity. Order, discipline, and cleanliness have become deeply woven into its public image, alongside its parks, wide roads, and strict local ordinances. Through the familiar tagline “Davao Life is Here,” the city projects a vision of urban life in which growth, public order, and environmental responsibility exist side by side.

That image reached an international audience in 2024, when Numbeo’s Mid-Year Pollution Index ranked Davao as the second least-polluted city in Southeast Asia, behind only Singapore. The ranking relies on crowd-sourced perceptions submitted by website users rather than official environmental measurements, yet it reinforced a belief long held by many residents: Davao is one of the cleanest cities in the Philippines.

Every clean street, however, leads somewhere.

The plastic bags lifted from curbsides do not vanish when collection trucks pull away. The wrappers swept from sidewalks, the food discarded from markets, and the household waste left outside homes all continue their journey beyond the neighborhoods that produced them. For years, most of that journey ended at the Davao City Sanitary Landfill in Barangay New Carmen, Tugbok District.

On May 20, 2026, the city was forced to confront what lay at the end of that journey.

At around 1:10 p.m., a massive mound of garbage collapsed inside the landfill, burying approximately 3.72 hectares beneath an avalanche of waste. The trash slide blocked access roads, damaged nearby houses, killed two people, while retrieval teams continued searching for another missing individual in the days that followed.

In a matter of moments, the collapse exposed a part of Davao City’s daily life that usually remained out of sight. The garbage collected before dawn, removed from streets, and carried away from homes had accumulated somewhere, and that place had reached a moment of disaster.

The following day, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) suspended landfill operations as search-and-retrieval teams continued their work and authorities conducted geotechnical assessments and engineering interventions. The measures aimed to stabilize the site, protect personnel and nearby communities, and prevent another collapse.

The consequences quickly traveled far beyond Barangay New Carmen.

According to previous reports from the Davao City Information Office, the city generates between 700 and 800 tons of solid waste daily. The volume can increase to as much as 1,000 tons during major city events such as Araw ng Dabaw and Kadayawan sa Dabaw. 

Once the landfill stopped accepting waste, the city’s disposal system began to strain. Collection slowed, plastic bags that normally disappeared before sunrise remained outside homes, and overflowing collection points began appearing across neighborhoods.

For many Dabawenyos, the disruption offered an unfamiliar sight. Garbage that had always disappeared overnight suddenly stayed where people could see, smell, and confront it. The city’s waste had not increased overnight; its usual destination had simply become unavailable.

Soon, the crisis spilled into public view.

Davao City Mayor Sebastian “Baste” Duterte blamed the landfill suspension for the growing garbage backlog and designated the area outside the Department of Environment and Natural Resources Region -Davao office in Lanang as an additional collection point. Within days, piles of foul-smelling garbage accumulated outside the agency’s compound, turning an administrative dispute into a visible symbol of the city’s worsening waste crisis.

The DENR maintained that landfill operations would remain suspended until authorities completed the required engineering and safety measures. Its personnel continued conducting slope-stability assessments, leachate monitoring, and site inspections while coordinating with the city government on rehabilitation work. Around 180 families remained evacuated from high-risk areas surrounding the landfill, while authorities restricted access to the site as retrieval operations continued.

The confrontation dominated headlines, yet beneath the public disagreement between the city government and the environmental agency lay a deeper question that received far less attention.

If Davao City’s cleanliness depends heavily on a single landfill, what happens when that landfill can no longer carry the weight of the city’s waste?

The answer does not begin at the landfill.

It begins about 15 kilometers away, in homes, markets, restaurants, offices, and streets, every time someone throws something away and watches a garbage truck carry it out of sight. The waste may disappear from the curb, yet its journey continues, and somewhere beyond the city’s clean streets, someone or something must carry its weight.

The Weight

Barangay New Carmen does not announce itself with a welcome sign. It announces itself with a smell.

Long before the Davao City Sanitary Landfill comes into view, the odor reaches the roadside. It hangs over homes, settles around small stores, and travels with the dust stirred by garbage trucks moving one after another toward the city’s final disposal site. For the families who live nearby, the smell is not an occasional inconvenience. It is part of the air they breathe every day.

In the afternoon of July 11,  a hundred garbage trucks stood bumper to bumper along the narrow road leading to the landfill. Their engines hummed beneath the afternoon heat as drivers waited for repairs on the liner of the new sanitary landfill to be completed before dumping could resume. Even with disposal operations temporarily suspended, the smell already drifted across the area. Each truck held the ordinary remains of city life — food scraps, plastic packaging, paper, bottles, and countless other items discarded only hours earlier in homes, restaurants, offices, markets, and commercial establishments across Davao City. 

For most residents in the city, that waste had already disappeared. In New Carmen, it had only arrived.

The trucks formed a long line toward the landfill, offering a visible reminder that garbage does not vanish when it leaves a household. The city collects it, transports it, and delivers it somewhere else. Every clean street has a destination for what has been swept away, and for years, much of Davao City’s waste has ended its journey here.

The landfill has become woven into the landscape of New Carmen and into the daily lives of the people who live around it. Some residents endure the smell and constant truck traffic, while others have built livelihoods around materials the rest of the city has thrown away.

The community, however, was there long before the landfill. Residents say families have lived in the area for around 70 years, decades before the city’s sanitary landfill began operating in 2010. Over time, the arrival of Davao City’s waste reshaped everyday life, bringing garbage trucks, persistent odor, environmental risks, and, for some residents, opportunities to earn from recyclable materials discarded by others. 

For Evelyn, 62, Davao City’s discarded waste once offered a means of survival.

For years, she entered the landfill before sunrise and searched through mountains of garbage for plastic bottles, scrap metal, and other recyclable materials she could sell to junk shops. The work demanded long hours under difficult and often dangerous conditions, yet every bottle recovered and every piece of metal collected could mean additional money for food, electricity, or medicine.

Her working day began where the city’s garbage ended.

When the May 20 trash slide buried part of the landfill, authorities prohibited scavenging as recovery operations continued and the site remained closed. Evelyn lost, almost overnight, the livelihood she had depended on for years.

The garbage remained. Her income did not.

“Wala na gyud mi panginabuhi sukad gisirhan nang basurahan. Naga salig na lang mi sa ihatag sa gobyerno nga ayuda. Kung walay muabot, gutom gyud kay kasagaran sa mga tao, mao ra gyud nay panginabuhi diri—mang bote ug bakal ra gyud.” (We no longer have a livelihood since the landfill was closed. We now depend on whatever assistance the government gives us. If no aid comes, we go hungry because, for most people here, collecting bottles and scrap metal is our only source of income), she said.

A few houses away, Sonia, 60, experienced the consequences of the collapse through a different kind of loss. She owns a modest neighborhood store that once served many of the landfill’s informal waste pickers. They bought rice, canned goods, coffee, cigarettes, and other daily necessities, often on credit, then paid their debts after selling the bottles, scrap metal, and recyclables they had recovered.

When scavenging stopped, many of those payments stopped.

Some customers disappeared altogether. Others returned only to explain that they no longer had work and could no longer pay. Sonia’s 38-year-old son had also depended on scavenging for income, and since the landfill closure,  has remained unemployed.

“Daghan sa akong mga suki wala na kabayad kay wala na silay panginabuhi. Ang uban wala na gyud nibalik. Kasagaran man gud sa panginabuhi diri kay mang bote ug bakal ra gyud. Unya gibawalan na man mi nga musulod didto, wa na gyud panginabuhi ang mga tawo diri. Naa ray usahay, panguhaon sa mga bata ang mga basura nga matagak gikan sa trak, pero dili gyud daghan aron makapalit ug bugas ug sud-an. Lisod ug pait gyud kaayo” (Many of my regular customers could no longer pay because they no longer have a livelihood. Some never came back. Most people here depend on collecting bottles and scrap metal for a living. Now that we are no longer allowed to enter the landfill, people have lost their source of income. Sometimes the children collect pieces of garbage that fall from the trucks, but it is never enough to buy rice and food. Life has become very difficult and painful), she said. 

The collapse buried piles of garbage, yet its consequences reached far beyond the damaged section of the landfill. It disrupted livelihoods, emptied pockets, weakened small businesses, and halted an informal economy built around materials that the rest of society no longer wanted.

The tragedy also exposed a reality that often remains absent from conversations about waste management: landfills are surrounded by human lives.

Communities grow beside them. Families build homes within reach of their smell. Children grow up watching garbage trucks pass each day, while sari-sari stores, junk shops, drivers, and informal waste pickers depend on the activity created by the constant movement of waste. 

When the landfill stopped operating, garbage collection was not the only system disrupted. An economy that had quietly supported families for years also came to a standstill.

The contrast is difficult to ignore. People who live closest to the city’s waste often bear its greatest burdens, even though much of that waste comes from homes, businesses, markets, offices, and institutions many kilometers away.

Residents of New Carmen live with what others leave behind.

They breathe the odor. They watch convoys of garbage trucks pass their homes. They face the environmental risks of living beside a disposal facility, and when the system breaks down, they stand closest to the consequences.

Most of the garbage arriving in New Carmen comes from elsewhere, yet the community carries its weight every day.

The May 20 collapse forced Davao City to confront a truth that residents of New Carmen had long understood: garbage does not disappear when the truck drives away. It simply changes address.

For years, Barangay New Carmen quietly carried the burden of keeping Davao City’s streets clean. Then, in a single afternoon, that burden came crashing down.

Cracks

The tragedy in Barangay New Carmen did not begin on May 20.

Its roots reached years earlier, long before the mountain of waste gave way and forced Davao City to confront the pressure building inside its disposal system.

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines during a media forum in June 2025, Lakandiwa Orcullo, head of the Environmental Waste Management Division of the City Environment and Natural Resources Office, said Davao City’s original sanitary landfill had already reached full capacity and had continued operating beyond the point it was projected to be filled in 2023. 

“We don’t have a choice right now. We have to maximize the existing landfill,” Orcullo said.

The numbers underscored the mounting pressure on the city’s waste disposal system. According to the Environmental Impact Statement for the New Sanitary Landfill Facility, the original landfill began operating in 2010 with a designed capacity of between 700,000 and 800,000 metric tons of waste. By 2023, when the city proposed developing a new sanitary landfill adjacent to the existing site, the old facility had already received around 900,000 metric tons—surpassing the capacity it was originally built to hold. 

The same environmental study warned that improper landfill management could threaten surrounding ecosystems, including waterways that eventually drain into the Davao Gulf. Yet for environmental lawyer Mark Peñalver, executive director of Interfacing Development Interventions for Sustainability (IDIS), the landfill represents only the final stage of a much longer journey.

Speaking during the MindaNews Climate-Environment Field Reporting Workshop on July 10, Peñalver said, “The solution is not just downstream. The solution is upstream, midstream and downstream.”

The idea is straightforward: the landfill is where the waste problem becomes visible, not where it begins. 

Under Republic Act No. 9003, otherwise known as the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000, households, schools, hospitals, businesses, and other waste generators must segregate garbage at the source. Barangays are responsible for managing biodegradable and recyclable materials through Materials Recovery Facilities, while cities should collect only residual waste — the portion that can no longer be reused, recycled, or composted — for final disposal in sanitary landfills.

Republic Act No. 9003 also identifies squatting in open dumps and landfills as a prohibited act under Section 48. In New Carmen, however, residents say the surrounding community has existed for around 70 years, decades before the city’s sanitary landfill began operating in 2010. This distinction matters because their presence cannot simply be framed as people settling around a disposal site; rather, a major waste facility became part of the landscape of a community that had already existed for generations. 

In principle, New Carmen should receive only what remains after communities have recovered everything that can still be composted, reused, or recycled.

In reality, much more reaches the landfill.

“When we talk about solid waste management, it’s a systems approach. Everyone has a responsibility — the barangay, most especially the government,” Peñalver said. “The barangay and the city should closely coordinate and, of course, provide facilities for the proper management of our waste.”

The cracks in that system begin much earlier than the landfill gates.

Citing findings from the Commission on Audit, Peñalver said only about 124 of Davao City’s 182 barangays have Materials Recovery Facilities, and only four were found to be operational. The figures expose a significant gap in the infrastructure designed to keep recyclable and biodegradable materials away from the landfill. Where facilities do not exist or fail to function as intended, the consequences eventually travel with every garbage truck bound for New Carmen.

Residents from several barangays have also observed that even when households separate biodegradable, recyclable, and residual waste before collection, collectors often load the garbage into the same truck. Once different kinds of waste are mixed together, much of the effort made at the household level is effectively undone.

“Because there’s no proper segregation, no systemic collection of garbage, everything is collected and brought to the landfill,” Peñalver said.

The result is a disposal system that buries materials that should never have reached the landfill in the first place.

According to IDIS, roughly 80 percent of Davao City’s daily waste is biodegradable. Much of this material could be composted and managed within communities rather than occupying increasingly limited landfill space. Only residual waste should require final disposal, yet biodegradable materials, recyclables, and residuals often end up buried together.

As these materials accumulate, the problem extends beyond landfill capacity.

Organic waste buried beneath layers of mixed garbage decomposes without enough oxygen and produces methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas. Unlike the long lines of garbage trucks waiting along New Carmen’s roads, methane cannot be seen, yet it can escape from landfills for years or even decades after a disposal site has closed.

The climate consequence may be invisible, but the process begins with ordinary decisions repeated every day: a food scrap thrown into the wrong bin, a recyclable mixed with residual waste, a barangay without a functioning recovery facility, or a collection system that combines what households have already separated.

For Peñalver, effective waste management requires society to look beyond the final destination of garbage and examine how people produce, consume, discard, and assign value to the things they use.

He argues that cities should move toward a circular economy, where products last longer, people repair rather than immediately discard them, communities reuse materials before replacing them, and recycling prevents valuable resources from becoming waste. Every bottle reused, every food scrap composted, and every plastic container recovered means one less item competing for space inside a landfill already under pressure.

“The landfill is only the end of the story,” Peñalver said. “If we want to solve the problem, we have to start at the beginning.”

That beginning lies far from the towering piles of waste in Barangay New Carmen. It begins in every home that throws away a plastic container, every restaurant that discards food scraps, every business that generates packaging, every barangay responsible for recovering reusable materials, and every government decision that determines what happens after a garbage truck drives away.

The May 20 collapse exposed the physical failure of a mountain of waste, yet the cracks had formed long before the garbage came crashing down.

They appeared wherever segregation failed, where recovery facilities remained absent or nonfunctional, where collection systems mixed materials that should have stayed apart, and where too much waste was allowed to reach the final disposal site. By the time the landfill collapsed, the weight had already been building for years.

The Reckoning

Davao City proudly carries the tagline, “Davao Life is Here.”

For millions of residents and visitors, those words evoke clean streets, disciplined communities, and orderly public spaces. They reflect an image the city has cultivated over decades through environmental campaigns, local ordinances, government programs, and public participation.

In many ways, that image is deserved.

Street sweepers clear public roads. Garbage trucks collect household waste before dawn. Environmental policies encourage segregation, recycling, and responsible disposal. For most residents, the system works quietly enough that the journey of their garbage seems to end the moment a collection truck drives away.

Barangay New Carmen tells the part of the story that the city’s clean streets cannot.

Here, Davao City’s waste completes the journey that begins each morning outside thousands of homes. Garbage trucks arrive one after another, carrying food scraps, plastic packaging, bottles, paper, and countless other remains of daily life from communities many kilometers away.

Residents live with the odor of a landfill that much of the city’s nearly 2 million  residents rarely see. Families have built livelihoods around materials others have discarded, while small businesses have grown alongside an informal economy sustained by waste. On May 20, that same landscape became the site of a tragedy that showed how dangerous the accumulated weight of a city’s garbage could become.

The landfill collapse exposed a physical disaster and the deeper weaknesses of the system that allowed so much waste to reach New Carmen. It showed how heavily Davao City’s image of cleanliness depends on a disposal system whose environmental risks and everyday burdens remain concentrated in one community.

The tragedy also forced difficult questions about environmental governance into public view.

Peñalver argued that the continued arrival of mixed waste in New Carmen raises questions about how Republic Act No. 9003 and Davao City Ordinance No. 0361-10 are being implemented. The ordinance passed in 2010 declares it the city’s policy to “adopt and implement a comprehensive, integrated and ecological solid waste management program” to protect public health and the environment. Yet despite these national and local policies, mixed waste continues to reach the landfill, and biodegradable materials that could otherwise be composted or recovered still occupy valuable landfill space. For Peñalver, these conditions point to persistent gaps in the enforcement and implementation of the city’s solid waste management system.

These questions matter because the consequences of weak waste management do not begin at the landfill gates. They begin much earlier, in every stage where waste could have been reduced, segregated, recovered, composted, or recycled but was instead allowed to continue its journey toward final disposal.

For Peñalver, understanding that journey requires looking at solid waste management as one connected system rather than focusing only on the disposal site.

“The solution is not just downstream,” he said.

Waste management begins long before a garbage truck reaches the landfill. It starts with the way products are designed, the choices consumers make, the way households segregate their waste, the capacity of barangays to recover recyclable and biodegradable materials, and the willingness of local governments to invest in facilities and systems that prevent unnecessary waste from reaching landfills.

The landfill stands at the final stage of that process. When failures accumulate upstream, their consequences eventually arrive downstream.

The May 20 trash slide made that reality impossible to ignore.

The collapse killed people, injured others, displaced families, and disrupted livelihoods. The suspension of landfill operations that followed left garbage accumulating in neighborhoods across the city, forcing residents to confront what usually disappears from view before sunrise.

Waste never truly vanishes. It moves.

It moves from a kitchen bin to the curb, from the curb to a collection truck, from the truck to a landfill, and from one community’s sight into another community’s daily life. At every stage, someone makes a decision about where it goes, how it is handled, and who carries the risks that come with it.

Perhaps that is the most enduring lesson Barangay New Carmen offers: clean streets alone tell only part of the story.

Peñalver argued that effective solid waste management extends far beyond the landfill, beginning with waste reduction, segregation at the source, recovery, and proper collection before garbage reaches its final disposal site. The experiences of residents in New Carmen reveal what happens when those systems fail. For families living beside the landfill, the consequences are measured not only in the volume of waste they receive, but also in lost livelihoods, environmental risks, and the uncertainty that followed the May 20 collapse.

Every morning, before sunrise, Davao City’s garbage will once again disappear from its streets.

About 15 kilometers away, another community will watch it arrive.

Between those two places lies the journey of the city’s waste—a journey shaped by the choices of households, the effectiveness of barangay waste recovery, the enforcement of environmental laws, and the capacity of the city’s waste management system. 

For residents of Barangay New Carmen, that journey does not end when the garbage truck drives away. It begins when it arrives.

(Audrey Alicaya / SunStar Davao for MindaNews)

[This story was produced during the Climate Impact and Environment Field Reporting Lab on July 10 to 13 in Davao City. It was organized by the Mindanao Institute of  Journalism, publisher of MindaNews, under the Media Impact Philippines project. This is also supported by International Media Support (IMS) and co-funded by the European Union and the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA)]