For Part 1:
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 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 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.
During a July 11, 2026 field visit, nearly 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, he 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," she said.
("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.")
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. ACA
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[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)]
