The landfill was scheduled to close on the day it killed 32 people

At around two in the morning on Sunday 23 August, after heavy overnight rain, the side of the Dar es Salam landfill in Conakry, Guinea gave way and buried the homes built against it. Guinea's civil protection service put the toll at 32 dead and 27 injured by Monday afternoon. The government's first communiqué had said 30. The figure has moved several times and may move again.

Two facts matter more than the rainfall.

First, the site was already condemned. The Governor of Conakry had been there on Thursday 20 August, three days earlier, with three ministers and conducted a census of the dwellings around the tip. Residents were told a fence would go up within the week. Everyone involved knew the place was lethal, and people were still sleeping at the foot of it, because that is where the salvageable material is and because there was nowhere else to go.

Second, this has happened at Dar es Salam (Guinea) before. In August 2017 the same waste mountain collapsed onto the same neighborhood and killed nine people. Nine years on, the city was still stacking rubbish on the same ground and families were still living underneath it.

So, the question. How many people have to die before we accept that a landfill is not a waste management strategy?

Guinea Landfill

This is not a run of bad luck

March 2017, Koshe, Addis Ababa: 116 people killed. February 2018, Hulene, Maputo: 17 killed. August 2024, Kiteezi, Kampala: early reports said 21, by the time the counting stopped, around 35 had died.

Set those events side by side and the script is identical. A site that reached capacity but kept receiving waste anyway. A slope raised far higher than the laws of physics would allow. Weeks of rain, then one very bad night of it. Homes at the base, because land beside a dump is the cheapest in the city and the work is there. A recommendation to close, written, filed, not acted on. Then the excavators, the mourning, the inquiry, the promise of relocation.

Four countries, four governments, one outcome. That is not bad luck. That is a system set up to fail. 

I spent years inside a bureaucratic ‘organisation’ and I know how these events get processed there. A situation report, a coordination meeting, a line item for emergency shelter. All of it necessary, none of it resolving the root cause of why waste was piled there in the first place. 

Women in Guinea leaving the Landfill Site

The deaths nobody counts

A collapse makes the news because it looks like an event. It has a time, a place and a number. The larger harm has none of those things. Informal waste pickers working all day in hazardous trash and broken glass. Children living beside a burning tip emitting toxic fumes more or less permanently. Households drawing water from ground water contaminated by waste leachate for decades.

That does not produce an immediate death toll, so it never produces a response. Both groups are damaged by the same decision. One version happens in a night, which makes it visible. The other takes twenty years, which makes it acceptable. The absence of a headline is not the absence of a tragedy.

Where do you think it goes?

Now the uncomfortable part, the average person on our planet throws away around 280 kilograms of household waste a year. In wealthy countries it is over 800. Across a normal lifespan that is somewhere between twenty and sixty tonnes each. Whatever your own number is, it is measured in tonnes, and it goes on existing after you have stopped thinking about it.

Most of us put something in a bin and the matter is closed. But nothing disappears at the point of collection. Someone lifts it. Someone sorts it by hand. Someone burns it. Someone lives next to where it lands. In Conakry on Sunday morning, thirty two people died underneath it.

I am not suggesting that any individual reader caused a landslide in Guinea. I am suggesting that a culture of turning a blind eye, perpetuates this vicious system. Regrettably, most of us oblige

The landfill in Guinea

After the cameras leave

Conakry will now receive a great outpouring of sympathy, condolences, prayers, emergency funds, perhaps a serious sum committed to closing the site and relocating the families. That response is right, and I hope it is generous.

But we have watched what comes next, in Addis Ababa, in Maputo, in Kampala. Attention moves on. The waste does not. The city produces the same tonnage on the Monday after the funerals as it did the week before, and still has nowhere to put it.

So the question is not whether another landfill will collapse in an African city. It is which city, which families, and when. 

We are not asking anyone to build a better landfill

Chanzi Group does not think the answer to Conakry is a better engineered hole in the ground. Improving landfill safety is worth doing where landfills exist, and none of this is an argument against fencing off Dar es Salam. But it treats a symptom. The prior question, the one that almost never gets asked in a municipal tender, is why we are building infrastructure to bury resources at all.

Almost everything in that waste mountain had value on the way in. Organic material, typically more than half of what an African city throws out, is agricultural input. Plastic, metal, glass and paper are valuable materials. We pay to collect them, pay to bury them, then pay again to import the fertiliser and raw material we have just thrown away.

Chanzi Group is built around that observation. Okota handles collection, sorting, recovery, recycling and upcycling infrastructure. Chanzi Farming converts organic waste into agricultural value, which is how we have ended up supplying thousands of smallholder farmers with fertiliser at a fraction of the synthetic fertiliser price. The linear model is take, make, waste. What we are building is circular, not a complicated philosophy, it is simply the opposite of what most cities currently pay for.

Okota Material Recovery Facility, Muriet Arusha

What it would actually cost

Take Conakry.

Our own modelling suggests the infrastructure to holistically and sustainably manage 100% of waste produced by a city of that size so it is no longer dependent on a dump site like Dar es Salam, could be established for somewhere around 17 million dollars. 

Seventeen million dollars sounds enormous until you consider where Guinea currently sits. $17m represents just 10% of Conakry’s spending on waste "management" infrastructure to date. $17m is slightly less than a year's wages for Mohamed Salah. That is not an argument for the man to fund Guinean sanitation personally. It is a way referencing the figure against things we already treat as normal cash allocation. 

The money exists. Burying waste is simply a cost centre nobody enjoys funding, while recovering it is a business almost nobody has been willing to underwrite at scale.

Zero-waste cities are an investment decision

Our ambition is zero-waste cities in Africa. I am aware of how that phrase sounds, so let me put it in the least utopian terms I can.

A zero-waste city is not a moral condition. It is an infrastructure outcome, and requires the very ordinary pre-requisties: capital, political will, functioning municipal systems, operators who can run a facility, markets that will buy recovered material, and citizens who understand that their responsibility does not end at the lid of the bin.

The economic question matters as much as the humanitarian one. Not only how we stop waste from killing people, but how we turn millions of tonnes a year of buried material into something that employs people, creates value and feeds farms. Much of our own workforce used to pick waste informally. That is not charity. It is the same material, the same people, and a system that pays for it properly.

If you decide where capital goes, in a fund, a government, a development institution, a board or a city authority, this part is addressed to you. Doing nothing is also an investment decision. Every one of these collapses is the return on a choice to leave the existing system in place. We would rather talk before the next one than after it.

Two things

If you are an individual: find out what actually happens to your waste in your city. Throw away less. Separate what you can. Support the businesses trying to build something better, and be suspicious of anyone selling disposal as a solution. You are part of this system, and behaving as though you are not is precisely how it continues.

If you influence investment: get in touch. We will show you the modelling, the facilities and the parts we have not yet solved.

Thirty two people in Conakry did not die of unusual rainfall. They died because their city had nowhere to put its rubbish except on top of them, and because that was allowed to stand for nine years after the same site last killed people.

When we throw something away, there is no such place as ‘away’. There is only somewhere else, and someone else, who lives there.

We know what the alternative looks like and roughly what it costs. I would rather show it to you before the next collapse than after it.