Phnom Penh City Hall will build two new waste management sites in order to to alleviate traffic congestion exacerbated by the need to transport all of the city’s garbage to a single dump in Dangkao district, municipal governor Pa Socheatvong announced on his Facebook page on Sunday.
The governor wrote the new sites would be located in Chroy Changva and Chbar Ampov districts, and that the Dangkao dump would be expanded with the digging of two more landfills, but did not say when the projects would begin.
“The Phnom Penh municipality will conduct studies to build two more dump sites…with the aim of preventing the transportation of garbage from far-away areas, which causes transportation delays and traffic jams, as well as many road accidents,” he wrote.
According to the governor’s Facebook post, more than 3 million tons of waste has been deposited at the Dangkao dump over the past six years, and about 2,000 tons of garbage is transported there every day—57.4 percent of it biodegradable food waste and 18.1 percent of it plastic.
A study released by the Asia Foundation in August estimated that the Dangkao dump would reach capacity by 2020. And in contrast to Mr. Socheatvong’s figures, the research found that the refuse being generated by city residents is no longer mostly organic, but increasingly made up of plastics that do not break down easily.
Mr. Dimanche said the new dumps would employ more advanced waste management systems in order to address these problems, not to mention the acrid smell produced by landfills.
“We need to use waste management strategies like building recycling factories or burning waste for energy,” he said, explaining that City Hall was in the process of interviewing eight international and local waste management firms interested in participating in such projects.
Mr. Dimanche said the city had not yet pinned down exact locations for new dumps in Chroy Changva and Chbar Ampov.
“We talked with the Ministry of Environment about finding locations for building dump sites to serve not only the Phnom Penh municipality, but Kandal province, too,” he said.
