Smokey Mountain Two

Underfoot it’s as though I’m sinking into fresh snow, smoke stings my eyes, and there’s a familiar stench. The ground is spongy from several metres of compressed plastic; the smoke is toxic from the burning of treated wood to make charcoal; and the stink is like that of any dump site, except that it is mixed with the smell of the human lifestyle – cooking, morning breath and human faeces.

I’m at Smokey Mountain Two, the biggest active waste site in Manila, the Philippines. Its namesake, Smokey Mountain One was bulldozed in 1995 due to its pitiful living conditions.

The site where I now stand is completely man-made. It used to be part of Manila Bay, but years of rubbish and silt have piled up to create new land where the inhabitants now live.

I squint through the smoke at old Smokey Mountain One; a six-storey high mountain of rubbish now covered in patches of grass, where 20,000 people found their livelihoods and their homes for three decades.

Entire families – in fact generations – make between $1 and $4.50 US per day collecting recycling from freshly-dumped garbage from Manila.

An important livelihood here is charcoal, which is made by slowly burning old wooden furniture covered in dirt in an anaerobic environment (without air). This is how Smokey Mountain got its name, not because it sounds like an idyllic holiday ranch. Even Smokey Mountain One still smokes in the distance.

We walk through the 'streets', which are more like dirt roads, black with fine dust and rubbish, past houses made from off cuts of wood, scraps of metal and old car parts. Converted tricycles make a bedroom for two kids. Old bedsprings serve as fences and security doors. A shop attendant is cooking skewers on a BBQ made from old car tyres. The sides of the grill are curved – it looks like it was taken from the inside of an old refrigerator. This really is a creative place, where ingenuity is a survival skill and new inventions are born.

I respect that the people who live here are resourceful, but it’s not through choice that they are exposed to dangerous toxic waste everyday. It’s incredible to see that through necessity, people can become such experts on what can and can’t be recycled, or if it can’t be, they’ll find a use for it. It's the exact opposite of many people I know in Australia who have no need, and therefore no desire, to make an effort to reuse or recycle.

In one of the cul-de-sacs, planks of wood have been lain out to walk across the thick, black, rotting mud. Here in this depression, it’s easy to imagine that this place was once covered in the sour water of Manila Bay.

We approach the swirling, rancid soup of the newly-shaped bay. The bloated carcass of a pig is being poached in the centre of a foaming brown whirlpool. Workers are waist deep in the water, cleaning the dirt off plastic bags. In a methodical rhythm, thin layer after thin layer of wet plastic is laid onto a huge pallet. For 10 kg of clean plastic bags, these workers will get 100 pesos (just over $2 US), and about 50 recycled plastic 1-litre bottles will be made.

Blue trucks pull up to dump piles of rubbish on the barge before it also sets off to dump its load at another site in Montalban, Rizal. By this stage, most of the leftover waste is supposed to be biodegradable, but it's hard to imagine that everything could be scavenged out of these copious quantities of rubbish.

Last year, three whale sharks were found dead in Manila Bay – two were washed up to shore, and the other brought in by fishermen. An autopsy revealed that all three had rubbish in their gut.

The last in the Smokey Mountain recycling hierarchy chain must be those that sort through the ‘compost’ on the barges, when there is little left to scavenge. It’s a race against the clock to get as much as you can before the supposedly biodegradable load is emptied. Nimble teens fumble on top of the moving trucks desperately trying to get recyclables out before the tray is tilted onto the boats.

The main problem I have is that wealthier people and wealthier companies don’t manage their waste properly, leaving people such as those from Smokey Mountain to rummage through rubbish. In the past, some of this toxic waste was from other countries, although the ratification of the Basel Convention should have stopped this. I think that people expect this last point of resource recovery. It’s selfish reliance to assume that someone else will make the effort instead.

Another aspect, however, is that dumpsites like Smokey Mountain provide an important livelihood for people in poverty. If waste was managed properly, then how would these people feed their families?

Does this mean that it's good to litter in the Philippines? Is it better leave my plastic bottle on the street, rather than putting it in the bin? That way someone can come along and pick it up without having to rummage through a potentially dangerous bin? In Australia, if I throw a bottle in the rubbish instead of the recycling, it could end up in landfill for another 1000 years, slowly leaching chemicals into the soil.

I was lucky enough to attend a Christmas Party for the kids of Smokey Mountain II Day Care Center. UCCP-Tondo is an NGO that gives education, love and a little bit of hope to the kids of Smokey Mountain. The kids enjoyed a whole day of activities and games together with a development assistance organisation in the Philippines, DevConcepts Ph.

A particularly special treat for the kids was when JolliBee arrived - this is kind of like a Filipino version of McDonalds and Ronald McDonald. It was as though the kids had just stepped into a fantasy world, their faces stricken with awe and their arms uncontrollably reaching to squeeze the friendly giant character!

The kids – not through lack of room in their tiny stomachs – left more than half of their JolliBee meals uneaten. Names were carefully written on the partially-eaten polystyrene boxes and stored away to be shared later with the rest of the family. Even after the massive grab for lollies from the fallen piñata, the kids shared their loot amongst themselves, and not through pressure from the adults. The sense of community is strong here. Survival depends on working together and looking after each other. In these kids, there’s a lesson we can all learn about fair use of the resources available to us.

If you’re lucky enough to have your waste looked after for you, spare a thought for the families at Smokey Mountain Two. Be grateful for the system that you have, and while there’s always room for improvement, it shouldn’t be taken for granted.

As we are leave, one kid jumps on the back of the minivan. He’s holding onto the windscreen wiper and the tips of his toes are balancing on the numberplate. I turn around to wave to the hanger-on. He ducks out of view so I can’t see him, as though he’s doing something wrong. He doesn’t jump off until we reach the main road when the futility of his actions dawns on him. He can’t come with us.