We used to brag about our streets. For years, Davao City wore its cleanliness like a badge of honor, a badge to a disciplined populace. But walk outside today, and that pride evaporates into a thick haze.
Lately, the entire city has been deeply disturbed—not just by the sickening stench of rotting stacks of garbage, but by the very real, ticking health timebomb these eyesores present to residents. Piles of plastic bags, organic waste, and discarded packaging sit melting under the unforgiving tropical sun by day, only to be washed into our drainage systems by intermittent rains at night.
In the blink of an eye, a city famously known for its pristine streets is wrestling with its most basic civic duty: deciding where to put its trash.
Our waste management services didn’t just slide downhill; they collapsed. Literally.
On May 20, 2026, following days of torrential rain, an unstable mountain of garbage at the New Carmen Sanitary Landfill gave way. The resulting trash slide was catastrophic. It claimed the life of one resident, left several others injured, and exposed an underbelly of long-ignored violations—from dangerously steep slopes to inadequate leachate treatment. Within 48 hours, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) suspended landfill operations to facilitate retrieval efforts and ensure slope stabilization.
Suddenly, the invisible became impossible to ignore.
The New Carmen facility, a seven-hectare site that opened back in 2009, has been gasping for air for years. While the city has planned a Php 500-million expansion for an adjacent nine-hectare facility, that future fix does nothing for the present crisis. Councilor Tek Ocampo, chairperson of the City Council Committee for the Environment, stated the obvious last week: the city has to collect garbage, given the staggering volume we generate daily.
How much is that, exactly? Davao churns out 700 to 800 tons of trash per day. That means the city produces roughly 50 kilos of waste daily per resident. It is a crushing, unsustainable weight.
Here is the tragedy of our situation: over 60% of our daily trash consists of organic kitchen and food waste.
Read that again. More than half of what is currently choking our streets is biodegradable. If we simply separated our food scraps and organic matter at the source, we could drastically reduce the immediate volume suffocating our neighborhoods.
The Reality Check: We don’t have a garbage problem as much as we have a segregation problem.
The campaign for proper waste management has been going on for over a decade. The call for household-level segregation has been consistently promoted, yet these efforts haven’t shifted our collective behavior. We continue to throw away household waste mixed carelessly with recyclable or reusable materials.
Years ago, the concept of color-coded trash bins failed because the logistics weren’t there; we didn’t have different trucks to collect different wastes. Because the system felt broken, our collective desire for proper waste management just went down the drain. We returned to what was comfortable: dumping everything into a single black bag and hoping it would disappear from sight like magic.
Yet, a casual drive through our neighborhoods tells a completely different story. The system is failing on the ground because the chain of discipline has broken at the household level.
It is deeply alarming to watch our city change because uncollected garbage is now sitting on street corners like it’s renting space. We don’t have to imagine the swarms of flies or the rodents gallivanting across these piles—we see them. It’s a commercial nightmare, especially where rows of restaurants serve food just meters away from rotting waste. Worse, whenever heavy rains burst those bags open, toxic leachate seeps directly into our drainage, raising the terrifying specter of waterborne illnesses.
This crisis is a loud, foul-smelling wake-up call. We can no longer treat waste management as an invisible utility that operates on a single-site dependency. We cannot just throw things “away,” because “away” has officially run out of room.
Until the new facility opens its gates, our health and sanity rest on a fragile compromise. The government must fast-track safe, modern engineering at the landfill, but we, as households, must finally take segregation seriously. If we refuse to change our behavior at the kitchen sink, we will continue to pay a heavy, hazardous price for the trash we so eagerly try to push out of sight. That’s what matters.
