Smokey Mountain - environmental remediation

David is leading the environmental remediation component and invited the University of the Philippines to come with us to Smokey this morning. It was the first time David was visiting the area and my first time on the mountain. U.P. will be helping us with leachate testing. Leachate is the result of rain percolating through waste and reacting with the products of decomposition, chemicals and other materials in the waste and is basically slimy nasty stuff. Part of our strategy is to put a giant raincoat over the mountain to help collect the rain and treat it, rather than allow it to just ooze out of the mountain.

Here you can see the mountain, the community that is built around the mountain and also the mountain from up close -- it looks pretty and green but in fact is a pile of trash that has been sitting around for fifty years and stopped being used as an active dump for 10 years.

Here you can see where the rain water ends up... it oozes off the side of the mountain, pours into the two rivers on either side of Smokey, sits in concrete areas where children splash and play, and waters vegetable gardens growing on the sides of the trash mountain. Just because it's green, it doesn't make it good.

























































































This is a community where every four year old child knows that collecting plastic bottles can bring an income (this picture is taken on the main road driving pas Smokey and that goes South directly to my place on Manila Bay. We couldn't find a taxi so David convinced a fish truck to give us a ride).

It's also a land where banana trees are a sign of good fortune. One of our environmental leaders in the community asked me to take this picture. We are smack on top of the mountain of trash. It seems that good spirits called white dwendes live under certain trees.