Smokey Mountain — Manila’s former landfill and informal settlement

Characteristics and daily life

The landfill acted as both a disposal site and an informal marketplace. Residents and scavengers sorted through the dumped material to recover items such as plastics, metals and cardboard to sell to middlemen. Commonly recovered items included plastic bottles, glass fragments, cardboard and valuable metals like copper wire; these were sorted, cleaned and sold to small recycling enterprises or scrap buyers. A significant share of the community’s economy depended on this recovery work, despite the hazardous conditions.

• Cardboard and paper products
• Plastic containers and bottles (landfill scavenging)
• Glass and metal items, including copper wire
• Occasional resaleable household goods

Health, environmental and social issues

Open burning, methane generation and unstable piles created persistent hazards: thick smoke, toxic fumes, vermin, and the risk of fires and slides. Living and working at the dump exposed people—many of them children and entire families—to respiratory illnesses, skin infections and accidents. The site also illustrated the broader failures of municipal solid-waste management and urban housing policy: an informal settlement grew into a dense shanty town with limited access to sanitation, clean water and formal employment.

Closure and redevelopment

Authorities moved to close the original Smokey Mountain landfill in the mid-1990s. Dumping at that precise location ceased, and efforts were made to cap or cover the accumulated refuse, stabilize the ground and replace the shanty housing with planned relocation or low-income housing projects. Although the immediate mound was reduced and some public spaces or housing were established, the closure did not eliminate the regional problems: new disposal sites were used nearby, and many former residents or scavengers migrated to adjacent dumps or informal settlements to continue their livelihoods.

Legacy and broader context

Smokey Mountain remains an emblem of the intersection between waste management, poverty and urban policy. Its story highlights how closing a single dump without comprehensive social and economic support can displace problems rather than solve them. Similar sites and informal recycling economies exist in many other cities, and lessons from the Philippines case emphasize the need for integrated solutions that combine safer waste-processing infrastructure, formal recycling enterprises, and housing and livelihood programs to reduce dependence on hazardous informal work.

For further reading about the site and its people, historical accounts and documentary projects offer more detail on the community, the closure process and the ongoing challenges tied to urban waste in rapidly growing cities (Manila, estimates of accumulated waste, and social studies of the shanty town phenomenon).

Related materials and comparative cases often cite materials recovered from dumps (cardboard, landfill recycling), the impacts of smoke and burning (smoke, burning waste) and the economic role of reclaimed goods such as copper wire in informal markets.