Living and Dying on The Edge of The Dump
Landfill deaths in the Philippines’ Cebu City spur calls for reforms
By: Tita Valderama
Search and retrieval operations officially ended on January 18 in Cebu City with the recovery of the last victim of the collapse of the 20-story-high Binaliw Landfill, which occurred on January 8 when a garbage avalanche engulfed administrative and maintenance buildings. The grim toll was 36 dead and 18 injured after they were buried under tons of garbage, soil, steel trusses and discarded office structures. The site is reportedly operated by Prime Integrated Waste Solutions Inc., led by billionaire Enrique K. Razon Jr., chairman of International Container Terminal Services Inc., the Philippines’ largest ports operator by revenue, with subsidiaries in the Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, Africa and the Americas.
The disaster exposes the hollow core of the country’s waste management strategy, in which the dumpsite is not merely a place of refuse. It is home, workplace, lifeline and occasional macabre burial site. There are now 343 landfills scattered across the country, populated by scavengers and waste pickers, primarily impoverished families including children who survive by collecting and selling recyclables like plastic, metal and e-waste.
Most of the Binalaw victims were sanitation workers and residents housed inside the facility. Their deaths underscore the extreme risks borne by people forced by poverty to live and work amid hazardous waste. Families still depend on salvaging recyclables to meet basic needs like food and medicine. Informal settlers erect shanties on or beside towering piles of garbage, breathing toxic fumes, drinking contaminated water, and risking their lives daily to earn a few pesos. Children grow up sorting through waste instead of books, learning early that survival often comes before safety. This is not a choice; it is what poverty leaves behind when alternatives vanish.
Illegal dumps surged by 84 percent in the past year alone. The Philippines generates about 2.7 million tons of plastic waste annually, ranking it 3rd globally in mismanaged plastic pollution, including an estimated 163 million sachets used every day. Existing policies, including the 2022 Extended Producer Responsibility Act, have been criticized as toothless, focused on recovery after damage is done rather than compelling reductions in production.
In Binaliw, the landslide buried a Materials Recovery Facility and nearby houses, leaving children orphaned and families without breadwinners—another turn in a cycle that pushes the poor into the most dangerous environments. Now considered among Cebu City’s deadliest industrial disasters, the tragedy is a suffocating reminder that when environmental problems are swept aside, the ground eventually gives way.
Initial findings point to violations of the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act, enacted after a massive garbage slide in Barangay Payatas, Quezon City in July 2000 that officially killed at least 260 people although other estimates suggest the death toll was closer to 700–1,000. Laws strictly prohibit open dumps, yet investigations found Binaliw was effectively operating as one. Before the collapse, the waste pile was far beyond the safety limits of the original landfill design.
The most famous – or infamous -- of these dumpsites was the 17-story Smokey Mountain, covering 20 hectares on the outskirts of Manila and home to 30,000 people who made their living from picking through the landfill’s rubbish, attracting worldwide negative attention. The original site was closed in 1995 and converted into public housing, although 25,000 to 30,000 people still live in the immediate tenement and slum areas of Tondo –nicknamed Happyland (or Hapilan) that replaced the landfill. Thousands of the scavengers moved on to the Patayas site, which became known as Smokey Mountain II, and with more poverty and desperation.
That the Binaliw collapse echoes Payatas a quarter-century later, a facility labeled “sanitary” is a warning. Without strict enforcement and real support for the urban poor, crimes of neglect will recur. The facility’s operator has publicly attributed the collapse to the 6.9-magnitude earthquake in September 2025 and heavy rains from Typhoon Tino (Kalmaegi) in early November, which supposedly destabilized the massive heap of waste. Legal experts counter that proximate cause may still lie with improper stacking and ignored warnings. Preliminary assessments by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources cite waste oversaturation, excessive height, prolonged rainfall, and technical limits. The landfill reportedly handled nearly 1,000 tons daily, reaching unsafe heights and trapping methane-rich pockets amid mixed waste, symptoms of chronic failure in source segregation.
After an inspection on January 9, the environment department’s Environmental Management Bureau in Central Visayas issued a cease-and-desist order, after people had already been buried, after-the-fact enforcement after the mound rose to skyscraper scale. The Mines and Geosciences Bureau flagged the estimated 35-meter height, poor drainage and slope instability as key risks. The sudden closure of the facility, which services not only Cebu City, has triggered a regional waste crisis, forcing the neighboring Mandaue City, Lapu-Lapu City and Consolacion town to scramble for alternative disposal and temporary waste-handling solutions.
Environment Secretary Raphael Lotilla has ordered a comprehensive assessment to determine whether the site can ever reopen or must be permanently decommissioned. Yet warnings long predated the collapse. The landfill, originally run by ARN Central Waste Management and taken over by Razon’s Prime Integrated Waste Solutions in 2023, faced years of complaints about open dumping, foul odor, fly infestation, water contamination and unpermitted earth-moving. Inspections in 2024 and 2025 reportedly flagged violations and urged revocation of the site’s Environmental Compliance Certificate. This was not a sudden accident. Risks had been raised for more than seven years.
As search operations ended, attention turned to accountability. A Senate inquiry is forthcoming to examine compliance with the law and possible negligence by local officials and regulators. Human rights and labor groups are pushing to criminalize safety violations and pass a Magna Carta for Waste Workers to guarantee living wages and hazard pay. The Department of Labor and Employment is investigating reports that workers lacked social security and were exposed to imminent danger without adequate safeguards.
What happened in Cebu—and in Payatas 25 years ago—is not merely environmental. This was not a natural disaster. It was a systemic failure. A society that allows its poorest citizens to live and die under heaps of garbage has failed its most basic duty: to protect human dignity.
Brilliant reporting on how catastrophe becomes routine when poverty makes the deadly seem normal. The detail about children growing up sorting waste instead of reading books captures the intergenerational trap way beter than statistics could. I worked on urban waste policy briefly and saw how regulations exist on paper but enforcement depends on whether people matter. Razon operating under violations for seven years shows how the system protects capital over communities.
as the number of nations with this problem increases, the only justice will be when there is an authoritarian agenda.