Reaching the Tipping Point: Islamabad’s Waste Management Crisis

Behind Islamabad’s urban facade—green spaces and neatly laid out roads—a waste management crisis is reaching a head. The most visible reason for this is that the city has no designated landfill site even as proposals to build a new one have not received environment clearance.

The tipping point came when Islamabad’s I-12 dumping station reached full capacity and the I-11 transfer station was established in 2022 as a temporary waste collection junction from which waste would be moved every day to Lohsar, the official disposal site in the adjacent city of Rawalpindi, until the government created a new landfill site for the capital.[i] With the increasing population, unchecked urban sprawl and more waste being generated, the transfer station has become a permanent, rather than a transitional, measure.[ii] It now has around 5000 tons of waste , a mix of organic and inorganic materials—plastic, household waste, medical waste and industrial by-products—which has been a gradual accumulation since the station was established. This has happened because 50 dumper trucks arrive in a day, but only five or six leave for Lohsar, making the remaining mounds an environment and health hazard on slow burn.

Plastic waste, from which microplastics get released into the soil and water, is a contaminant. Leachate from heavy metals makes the water unfit both for human consumption and agricultural use, which residents confirmed by carrying out repeated potability tests. (Many homes in the area now have borewells as a safer drinking water option). Also, unenclosed garbage is a source of greenhouse gas emissions.

The Capital Development Authority (CDA), which collects the waste from most localities in the city and brings it to the transfer station at Sector I-11, has contracted the Rawalpindi Waste Management Company (RWMC) to transfer this to the dumpsite at Lohsar. But this daily task has been beset by operational inefficiencies as the RWMC is short on resources. 

The absence of a garbage tip in Islamabad is literally only the last in a series of escalatory factors. Local authorities, municipal governments and private entities are responsible for waste collection and segregation, but the infrastructure at their disposal is inadequate, and so, the majority of the waste is left untreated rather than being managed or recycled. The crux of the matter is that the rules that exist—a few acts, rules of local government, public health engineering rules and those devised by the Waste and Sanitation Agency (WASA)—work at the provincial or district levels, but do not address solid waste issues at the national level. For example, in Punjab, one of Pakistan’s four provinces (along with Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh, and two autonomous territories), rules put out by local government, public health, engineering and the Water and Sanitation Agency (WASA ), are followed , Dr Hamid Iqbal, Director of the RWMC, said, but they have little mention on how to deal with waste. The Pakistan Environmental Protection Act (PEPA) rules of 1997 had only a few clauses pertaining to waste management. A draft was made on Landfill Siting in 2005 (rules on where a landfill site could be constructed), but this is still in the draft phase. Dr Hamid also pointed out that since the I-11 transfer station site is not governed by any law, nobody is aware of the specific course of action to follow. Experts spoken to suggested that the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) could be given the task of streamlining rules regarding waste management and teaching workers the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).

Thus, in the absence of clear policies, implementation cannot be rigorous. Also, citizens’ awareness about how they can help—waste segregation at source, for example—is almost nil because the local authorities have failed to establish effective mechanisms to encourage their participation.

Rather, citizens are subject to an unbearable stench and a range of health problems, I-11 being located near residential and commercial areas, particularly the city’s fruit and vegetable market.[iii] Dr. Rana Jawad Asghar, epidemiologist, said that he was seeing an incidence of cardiac, eye and gastrointestinal ailments, besides water-borne diseases like hepatitis and typhoid. People have also been prone to allergies due to the burning of waste. 

Residents said that they had taken the matter to the Environmental Tribunal in 2022, but no concrete action resulted. The last hearing was in March 2024 when they were told that the station would be cleared by October. With no decision yet on this, in December 2024, the CDA decided to engage an international solid waste management company to provide integrated solutions.

While this will be a step forward, environmental policies would have to be created and strictly implemented so that they become integrated as societal norms, Dr Sofia Khalid, Associate Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Environmental Sciences at the Allama Iqbal Open University, said. 

There would have to be checks to ensure industries and households disposed of their waste properly. Penalties for illegal dumping and incentives for sustainable practices needed to be part of this strategy, Dr Hamid said. And this will apply equally to transfer stations. 

Is the transfer station concept sustainable?

Waste transfer stations, which, in Pakistan, are located in Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore, are useful as they address inefficiencies in the waste management system, particularly in urban and densely populated areas. Serving as a link between waste collection and the final waste disposal facility, they help consolidate waste from multiple collection vehicles into larger, high-volume transfer trucks bound for distant disposal sites. Waste can be screened here, which is vital for isolating the hazardous from the recyclable prior to disposal, and also makes for flexibility in selecting waste disposal options. The average duration for waste to be kept at a transfer station—waste retention time, as it is called—varies, depending on the type of waste, station capacity and the efficiency of the transfer process.

As waste management becomes a priority for sustainability and urban planning, more countries,  irrespective of economic status, are finding that transfer stations optimise their waste collection, transportation and processing systems. Many developed countries, such as the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, some European countries and also developing countries—Brazil, South Africa, India, Mexico and others—have waste transfer stations to manage solid waste efficiently.

But temporary transfer stations like this one, experts felt, could be devised differently. The CDA had planned to shift the I-11 transfer station to I-9 close to the waste water treatment plant located there, the aim being to convert this into a fully mechanised facility, which can be cost-effective and environment-friendly. This is four or five km away from I-11 and is the industrial area of Islamabad. 

This may take two years to complete, according to Dr Hamid, but the addition of certain features in the interim could upgrade the infrastructure for handling waste more efficiently. For example, building a platform where waste is dumped and then transferred to other trucks for transportation to the dump site would make the operation smoother. Reducing the distance between transfer station and dumpsite will enable the task to become a daily one, reducing, even eliminating, backlog. In the immediate term, the CDA could rent trucks to clear the buildup. To control the smell of decomposing garbage, he felt a wall, at least 20 feet in height, could be built. 

Useful also is it to have a material recovery facility for e-waste, glass, plastic and paper/cardboard. The remainder can be shifted in closed containers to a mechanical dump site and then to a sanitary landfill site where the leachate that is extracted can be recycled. A concrete pit below the dump area can be created for the leachate to collect. (At Liaqat Bagh’s mechanised transfer station, the leachate was drained into a huge pit. When the pit filled up it was emptied through suction jetting machines or water tankers, taken to the dump site in Lohsar, where it was recirculated on the waste so that heavy bacteria could be absorbed.) Alternatively, once the leachate dries down and the dump site reaches full capacity, it can become the site of a park. 

Other solutions that experts felt merited exploring are:

Enjoining citizens to recycle: This can significantly reduce the amount of waste being sent to the I-11 site. Educating citizens on waste reduction and segregation at the household level can be done via social media, corner meetings, school outreach, door to door campaigns and training.

Municipal waste incinerators could burn waste in an enclosed environment, Dr. Khalid suggested, since they produced particulate matter and were not environment-friendly. 

Formalising this informal industry through Public-Private Partnership would be beneficial, Dr Khalid and Dr Hamid said, because the sorting of waste (and what to retain to sell through the informal sector) could be done at the transfer station, reducing the amount transported to the garbage tip. 

Meanwhile, the city administration’s avowed aim of building a new waste disposal site away from the city, complete with waste sorting facilities, has not fructified for various reasons. Dr Khalid said attempts at developing landfill sites in Rawalpindi/Islamabad did not materialise because people were concerned about the objections raised during public hearings of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) reports on the sites proposed at Kurri and Sangjiani, both about 30 km away from Islamabad. The objections pertained to the proper handling of leachates so that the quality of water and soil was not affected, the emission of greenhouse gases and the curtailment of the stench and vector-borne diseases. Now the CDA is considering Lohsar as a likely site to develop after the public hearing is done when design specifications and all relevant environmental and social concerns will be met. 

Constructing a proper landfill in Pakistan will take five years, according to Dr Hamid, and despite it being a difficult proposition, efforts are underway to construct one each for Rawalpindi and Islamabad, equipped with all the facilities and in keeping with international standards. What may come up sooner is a policy for waste management, which helps resolve a man-made mountain of a problem.