This city is drowning under trash

Riding around Kinshasa’s bumpy streets, Michael Mahunda piles up his old motorcycle with trash that he dumps at an openair tip in a residential area — for lack of an alternative.

With no centralised waste collection or landfill sites, the sprawling capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo is blotted with steaming mounds of foul-smelling waste.

“There is rubbish everywhere and no fixed place where we can throw this garbage,” Mahunda said.

The 42-year-old garbage collector picks up plastic, cardboard and other rubbish from businesses across the densely packed city of 17 million inhabitants.

Balancing on the side of his improvised dustcart — a motorcycle fitted with a metal cage on the back — he dumps the load at a tip in the eastern suburbs.

It is one of several unofficial sites across Kinshasa’s 24 communes where residents, small rubbish collection businesses and NGOs dispose of waste.

A total of 7,800 tons of municipal solid waste is produced every day in Kinshasa, according to a study published in scientific journal Heliyon in 2023.

Local authorities, the European Union and other organisations have launched programmes to tackle the problem.

But most initiatives were short-term and city authorities have yet to launch a centralised rubbish collection and treatment programme.

Meanwhile, rubbish has also accumulated in rivers, on streets and at street corners.

– ‘Disgusting’ –

“It’s disgusting,” Roger Odiekila told AFP, standing near an unofficial rubbish dump in the Kintambo district.

“Look at how the neighbourhoods are damaged… everyone comes and they throw it (here),” he said, pointing at the rubbish heap.

Plastic, discarded shopping bags and cardboard boxes are among the waste, piled several metres high and emitting a foul smell.

Next to it, a river is also full of trash.

JPM Services, an NGO that collects rubbish in two communes, was involved in the Kin Bopeto (Clean Kinshasa) project, launched by President Felix Tshisekedi in October 2019.

“We fight so that our environment can be clean,” its president Jean-Pierre Muteba, 53, told AFP.

But he acknowledged that the NGO, too, had no choice but to dispose of the rubbish it collects at one of the unofficial dumps.

From 2008 to 2015, the European Union injected $1 million a month into the disposal of household waste across nine of Kinshasa’s communes.

The project included a landfill site to treat waste in the east of the city. But residents, rubbish collectors and organisations told AFP it was no longer open.

“It’s become a bin here… there are no public bins… we throw the rubbish here,” Blanchard Kipiomo, 24, who lives nearby, said.

“It has already been a while since this garbage has been lying around here, giving off a bad smell that we breathe in,” he added.

AFP asked the EU delegation in Kinshasa about the programme but has yet to receive a response.

– ‘Crackdown’ –

Kinshasa’s new governor Daniel Bumba admitted the city had “no final discharge centre, no landfill centre” to treat waste and announced a drive to tackle the rubbish problem.

“We are going to launch a major crackdown operation in the coming days, we are trying to sweep Kinshasa, clean Kinshasa,” Bumba said in a broadcast shared by city authorities on social media on July 11.

AFP did not receive a response to requests for more information on the initiative.

For Muteba, who runs JPM Services, the idea is good but must not simply be a flash in the pan.

“The crackdown is good, but after, it must be maintained,” he said.