Before I tell you much about the garbage dump road, I should probably “fill you in” on garbage dumps. There are basically two of ways to dispose of trash. Western countries (First World countries) have “sanitary landfills”; Developing Nations (Third World countries) have “garbage dumps”. It’s probably safe for me to say that most people in the United States have no idea where their trash goes once they put it out on the street to be pick up by the garbage truck. The safe and sanitary disposal of this material is something that we in the United States take for granted, but appropriate trash disposal is actually a great privilege of an affluent nation.
When your trash is picked up it is taken to a sanitary landfill. These landfills are referred to as “sanitary” because all trash placed in the sanitary landfill receives a daily cover of earth (clay cap). As the garbage trucks arrive in the landfill they unload their trash and a bulldozer pushes it out in a large layer across the top of previous layers. In addition, the bulldozer pushes out a layer of clay on top of this material. At the end of the day when no more trucks are arriving the bulldozer finishes pushing clay over the edge of the material and then track-walks it (compresses it) into place. Having a daily clay cover prohibits birds, vermin, squirrels, rabbits, insects, etc. from getting into the garbage and spreading disease. This process alone is an extremely beneficial health and safety feature provided to people throughout the US, but it’s only the beginning of the story. The state and federal governments have very strict regulations on the construction of sanitary landfills in this country.
The construction of a sanitary landfill starts with a geological and engineering survey. On all these landfills a geological investigation precedes the installation of the landfill in order to determine depth to bedrock, amount of alluvium/colluvium removals, landslides, faults, etc. All material that can compress under the weight of the landfill has to be removed to prevent differential subsidence, so the selected canyon (landfill footprint) must be stripped all the way down to bedrock. In addition, a significant amount of material has to be located that can be excavated and milled into clay for the bottom, top, and daily liners/covers. (The word “clay” actually describes a grain size; it’s the smallest grain size you can mechanically break any material into, and it has the unusual quality of strongly inhibiting water flow through it.)
Once the geologic and engineering investigations are completed, and the preliminary excavations are completed, a herringbone drainage system is installed (usually with four-inch or six-inch perforated drainage pipes) to capture any fluid that might leak out of the landfill. Then a clay liner several feet thick and a polyurethane liner are placed across the entire bottom and sides of the landfill. The polyurethane is actually heat melted together and tested to make sure that there are no leaks. Then a layer of sand is placed across the top of this in which another drainage system is installed that will drain the fluids (leachate) out of the landfill preventing decomposition and subsidence of the landfill waste material, and to prevent hydraulic pressure build up that could rupture the liner. I’ll let you imagine what kind of liquids can be contained in the leachate, but without question that material is nasty and once collected has to be cleaned up and properly disposed of. If any material should leak through this liner system, the emergency herringbone liner below the landfill will capture and drain the leaking fluid.
This intricate and complex system of landfill construction may seem like it is way too technical to be of value when all you want to do is to find some place to dump your trash, but believe me it’s not easy to keep a vast mountain of trash isolated from potable (drinkable) groundwater used by counties and city municipalities, or to keep the spread of diseases completely inhibited as a result of this monumental pile of trash, or to contain the trash so that none of it winds up sliding down the hill into your backyard! As an engineering geologist I’ve worked on six sanitary landfills that I can think of right off the top of my head including the Puente Hills landfill, (at the time the second largest landfill in the United States, second only to fresh kills landfill in New York State), and believe me there is a lot of money, time, effort, and science invested in the construction of these sanitary landfills for the protection of you and I, the citizens that produce the mountains of trash that builds them.
So, as I was saying, we were traveling through northern India in our truck-bus decorated with a colorful painted interior and hanggy Indian fuzz balls that adorn the inside walls of the vehicle, and every so often we would wind up stopping in an immense amount of traffic. Usually this was due to a four-way or three-way stop sign. Traffic would pile up behind each stop sign for miles (I’m not exaggerating here) in each direction. Now I know that sometime about 12,000 years ago after the invention of agriculture somebody came up with the idea of the wheel in order to move this new foodstuff from one city to another, and I know that humans have gotten pretty good with this concept of the wheel thing. But somewhere along the line the people in India never got the idea that you could lay the wheel sideways and use it as a traffic circle. They have traffic circles in most other countries around the world, but for some reason an understanding of this novel invention has never reached the outer communities of northern India. So you wait, and wait, and wait.
We were on the north side of the Ganges floodplain, about to leave the flatland behind and move up into the rolling foothills preceding the high Himalayas when we came to a sudden stop. For as far as you could see down the straight road in front of us the traffic on our side of the road was stopped. The other side of the road was empty except for very occasional cars that went by. Shortly after we stopped, for as far as you could see on the road behind us the traffic was also stopped. We all just sat there – stopped. The bus driver turned off the bus. People got out of their cars and trucks. We got out of the bus. Now remember, we were still on the Ganges floodplain, so the road is elevated approximately 15 feet above the surrounding countryside, and the countryside was still slightly underwater in this location though you could see it was no more than a few feet. It was a typical floodplain back-swamp environment with trees and shrubs growing up along the outlines of what undoubtedly were fields in dryer times of the year. And along the edge of the road, from the top side of the road all the way down the slope to the wet bottom of the berm that the road was constructed on, was garbage. And not just a little garbage – it was a huge amount of garbage – on both sides of the road – as far as you could see. It was obvious to me that we are near a very large city, and this road represented the only location that was high and dry enough for dumping trash. It also had the added luxury of being very accessible; it was after all the main road coming into the city. The road had that garbage smell that you get sometimes when you’re trash can gets a little too ripe, or the smell you sometimes get at a sanitary landfill, but this was a pretty strong ripe smell. And there we sat parked in it. What a novel way to greet visitors to the city; what a wonderful first impression. I was definitely impressed.
Now it soon became obvious that this traffic jam was a daily occurrence at this location, because before too long the merchandisers began to arrive. Yes, in this trash dump there were merchandisers. To modify WC Fields famous statement, “there’s a sucker born every minute… and they are sitting in a garbage dump in northern India”. There were people walking along the sides of the vehicle selling trinkets, hats, articles of clothing, and food. I especially remember the young boys who walked along the sides of the vehicles trying to sell mangoes and papayas, peeled, stuck on sticks, and carved into crude ornamental shapes. Yes, now this is exactly the environment that I would like to enjoy a succulent piece of tropical fruit in – amid the ripe smell of fly-infested rotting garbage, wondering what water they use to clean that fruit or that knife they carved the fruit with. I was so tempted by these young entrepreneurial purveyors of tropical delights that I could hardly constrain myself. What on earth were they thinking! Did anybody buy this foodstuff? We were sitting in the middle of an environmental and biological disaster, and they were selling mangoes? How could they have prevented this tragedy from happening in the first place? Could the people have band together and force their local politicians to install a more appropriate form of landfill? That would take education – an understanding of the biological diseases (bubonic plague, hepatitis, diarrhea, typhoid, you get the picture) and an understanding of the impact of the toxic materials they were placing in their own environment, and as a consequence absorbing into their daily lives. And it would take one other thing in short supply – money. Suddenly I didn’t feel so bad about the annually escalating trash fees that I was paying back in the states.
Proper waste management is a huge problem worldwide. The world’s 50 biggest uncontrolled garbage dumps similar to this one that I spent an enjoyable afternoon in are located all over the world including Africa, Asia, Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and China. They pose a serious threat to potable water supplies and human health; they pollute rivers, lakes, oceans, and agricultural soils; they generate methane and are continually smoldering on fire producing a host of toxic gases; and they release a significant amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It has been estimated that at least half the world’s population lacks access to even the most rudimentary waste collection and disposal services. It is truly a worldwide problem, and a frequently unmentioned ugly characteristic of what it means to be human.
Finally the cars started moving again and everybody got back in their vehicles, but it was not a rapid movement. It was that slow stop and go movement that frequently accompanies very heavy traffic in crowded cities (LA comes to mind). All total we spent at least two hours and possibly more, parked or moving slowly through stop and go traffic for miles until we came to a three-way stop. When we reached it, we turned right and drove unhindered the last mile or two into the large city that I knew we would be seeing. The city of course was situated on high ground beyond the reach of the Ganges floodwaters. How a city so close to floodplain waters can generate so much airborne dust as a result of the foot traffic I have no idea. We passed through the city without stopping and finally started our ascent into the foothills of the high Himalayas.
Next week: Danger On the High Himalayan Roads