In a foul-smelling, brown fog, hundreds of stooped figures pick their way like ghosts across a sea of garbage as herons wheel and dive over their heads.
A truck arrives, breaking the lethargy. With shouts and whistles, people rush from all sides, while children throw themselves onto the vehicle’s tailboards.
Clambering up, they tear frantically at its contents, unleashing an avalanche of leftovers, shredded paper, bottles and tin before the truck has even come to a stop.
Photo: AFP
This particular truck is the one that 13-year-old Jason Matthias and his friends have been waiting for: It comes from a posh area with several luxury hotels.
Jason grinned as he displayed his prize — a cream puff pastry still in its packaging — before wolfing it down. Wrested from the other children in the scrum around the truck, it is a big improvement on his breakfast of moldy bread.
Asked to name the toughest part of life at the dump, the shy teenager, who visits with his mother, pauses to think.
Photo: AFP
“Hunger,” he whispered.
More than 900 tonnes of waste is dumped daily in the landfill in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, a city of more than 1 million people.
Over an area the size of 17 football fields, layer upon layer of garbage is piled as high as a three-story building. In places, it spills over into the surrounding residential neighborhood.
Illuminated by dozens of small fires lit to burn plastic coatings off wiring, this almost lunar landscape where garbage forms hills and valleys is busy day and night.
Jason and his mother are among at least 500 catadores (collectors) who live on what they unearth there. Most are women and children — the most vulnerable members of society — who have no other options.
Tina Feliciana turned to the dump after her husband died. The mother of three sells plastic by the kilogram to a small recycling operation close to the dump. With few buyers, she must accept what is offered. On average, she earns US$16 a month.
Even in Mozambique, where more than half the population is estimated to live on less than US$1 a day, it is hard to see how she survives.
“I am suffering, but if I didn’t do any work I would have nothing for my children,” she tells reporters.
Maputo’s five-star hotels, new shopping malls and high-rise apartments are only a few kilometers from the dump, but they might as well exist in a parallel universe.
At the landfill, the only evidence of the frenetic pace of economic growth in a nation rich in coal and gas is that there is more garbage than ever.
The southern African country has been ranked among the 10 fastest-growing economies in the world over the past decade, even before significant dividends from the fossil fuels began to flow in. The average annual growth of 7.5 percent is expected to continue this year and the next, according to the IMF.
Yet 22 years after the end of a civil war that left the economy in tatters, Mozambique still ranks 178th out of 187 countries on the UN’s annual Human Development Index.
In theory, children are not allowed at the Hulene dump, but in practice it is impossible to keep them out.
“When I started here [in 2009] few children were coming in. Now there are almost the same number as the adults,” Hulene manager Americo Zacarias said.
A baby’s cries could be heard above the din of truck engines, coming from somewhere in the garbage. After draping him hastily in bubble wrap for protection, his mother hid him so that she could scramble in the latest truckload of garbage.
To the “tut-tuts” of older women, the teenage mother slinks back, chastened, to claim the infant.
The dump is the only life that Paolo Cunha and his two siblings have ever known. Their father has been stationed at the gate, directing the flow of garbage trucks, since before they were born.
The diminutive 11-year-old spends his days perched on a dumpster. He kicks his feet against the sides — one foot in an oversized boot, the other in a plastic flip-flop scrounged from the garbage.
Going barefoot is not an option. Apart from the usual hazards like broken glass lurking in the waste, abandoned weaponry, including live ammunition, is sometimes unearthed.
“It comes in with the rubbish,” Paolo’s father, Dercio Cunha, said with a shrug.
In an effort to protect themselves from the toxic methane gas that constantly streams from the garbage, many children wear masks fashioned out of old socks or other garments, with eye holes cut out.
Just a few hours on the Hulene landfill can leave one’s lungs aching.
Grandmother Helen Arnaldo, 48, said she had been working at the dump for “maybe 20 years.” but still felt “OK.”
Hulene is considered a health hazard by people living close by. Besides the acrid fumes it gives off, in rainy summer months, the stench is unbearable and swarms of flies from the dump invade houses. Over the past decade, several public protests have been staged to get it closed.
When Mozambique’s Portuguese colonial rulers chose the site half a century ago, it was well outside the city’s limits. Before 1960, Mozambique was one of the least urbanized countries in the world, but by 2010 the urban population had increased from 4 percent to 38 percent, the UN estimates.
During this rapid phase of largely uncontrolled urbanization, Maputo engulfed the dump, so that it now lies in the heart of the urban sprawl.
In 2007, authorities announced that they would close the dump and move it to a more “sanitary” site, 20km, outside the city’s modern limits. After numerous delays the municipality now says the relocation is going ahead after it secured millions in funding from South Korea, one of the country’s new trading partners.
Yet even if it does go ahead this time, the new dump will not be ready before early 2016. It is unclear what will happen to the catadores when it closes.
“I don’t know what we will do. Perhaps we will have to become thieves,” Dercio Cunha said as his children ran off to greet the next truckload of garbage. “We will have nothing to feed our kids.”
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: The chipmaker last month raised its capital spending by 28 percent for this year to NT$32 billion from a previous estimate of NT$25 billion Contract chipmaker Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (力積電子) yesterday launched a new 12-inch fab, tapping into advanced chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) packaging technology to support rising demand for artificial intelligence (AI) devices. Powerchip is to offer interposers, one of three parts in CoWoS packaging technology, with shipments scheduled for the second half of this year, Powerchip chairman Frank Huang (黃崇仁) told reporters on the sidelines of a fab inauguration ceremony in the Tongluo Science Park (銅鑼科學園區) in Miaoli County yesterday. “We are working with customers to supply CoWoS-related business, utilizing part of this new fab’s capacity,” Huang said, adding that Powerchip intended to bridge
Microsoft Corp yesterday said that it would create Thailand’s first data center region to boost cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, promising AI training to more than 100,000 people to develop tech. Bangkok is a key economic player in Southeast Asia, but it has lagged behind Indonesia and Singapore when it comes to the tech industry. Thailand has an “incredible opportunity to build a digital-first, AI-powered future,” Microsoft chairman and chief executive officer Satya Nadella said at an event in Bangkok. Data center regions are physical locations that store computing infrastructure, allowing secure and reliable access to cloud platforms. The global embrace of AI
Qualcomm Inc, the world’s biggest seller of smartphone processors, gave an upbeat forecast for sales and profit in the current period, suggesting demand for handsets is increasing after a two-year slump. Revenue in the three months ended in June will be US$8.8 billion to US$9.6 billion, the company said in a statement Wednesday. Excluding certain items, earnings will be US$2.15 to US$2.35 a share. Analysts had projected sales of US$9.08 billion and earnings of US$2.16 a share. The outlook signals that the smartphone market has begun to bounce back, tracking with Qualcomm’s forecast that demand would gradually recover this year. The San