Payatas: Lives Among the Mountains of Waste
On the outskirts of the Philippines’ capital Manila, in Quezon City, lies the Payatas community once dominated by a towering garbage dump that rose like a man-made mountain. Home to an estimated 30,000 residents, many of them informal waste pickers and their families. The site historically received up to 1,300 tonnes of the city’s trash each day. Here, men, women, and children survived by scavenging and recycling plastics, metals, cardboard, and more from the endless river of waste.
These powerful portraits capture the raw faces and expressions of the people who live off this recycling. Eyes that tell profound stories of misery, hardship, and remarkable resilience amid the constant stench, smoke, and chaos.
In July 2000, heavy rains triggered a devastating garbage landslide at Payatas, burying homes and claiming more than 200 lives, exposing the deadly dangers faced by those living on society’s edge. The tragedy drove major waste‑management reforms, culminating in the permanent closure of the Payatas landfill in 2017. Today the former dump has been transformed into an urban park with cycling trails, yet the broader community’s daily struggle for dignity and livelihood continues, a stark reminder of poverty, environmental injustice, and unbreakable human spirit at one of Manila’s most iconic and controversial sites.
