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Sprawling over some 30 acres, the Dandora dump in Kenya is one of the widest open-air dump sites in eastern Africa. Lying outside Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, it takes loads of the city’s solid waste. Strangely, it employs a few people living in the city -waste pickers, who earn around USD 3 a day to make their living.
Sprawling over some 30 acres, the Dandora dump in Kenya is one of the widest open-air dump sites in eastern Africa. Lying outside Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, it takes loads of the city’s solid waste. Strangely, it employs a few people living in the city -waste pickers, who earn around USD 3 a day to make their living.
Poverty and grim economic prospects force many to join the ranks of waste pickers to eke out a living, little realizing it presents an environmental problem. The dumping ground adds toxicity to the land where crops cannot grow and produces the fatal methane gas, which contributes to global warming.
According to a recent United Nations report, the world wasted about 1.05 billion tons of food it produced in 2022. This represents about 19% of the food produced globally that year.
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The report is co-authored by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), an international charity. The head of Kenya’s Nutrition Society believes the issue should be addressed from the farm to the table. He remarked that food waste was a critical component that had to be addressed for any nation around the world to be able to achieve food and nutrition security. Food waste is an increasing concern in Kenya, where an estimated 4.9 million tons of food is squandered yearly.
