Spread over an area of 40 football fields, New Delhi's garbage mountain towers over nearby buildings.

Ghazipur landfill in New Delhi is India's highest rubbish mountain, spreading over an area larger than 40 football pitches. It is predicted to grow taller than the Taj Mahal by 2020. Along with the smell, smoke and pollution from this mountain of trash are said to be the ‘cause of all diseases’ in the surrounding neighbourhoods.

Here it is on Google Maps, next to a "dairy farm":

It is, unquestionably, killing the locals.

"It was a flood of trash," says Kumar. "I saw heaps of garbage coming down the hill like a flood and suddenly, we were swept into the canal. For a moment, everything went dark," he told Al Jazeera. Kumar was lucky. A sudden thrust from within the canal pushed him on to the surface and he was rescued by the locals of Mullah Colony, only a few hundred meters away from the infamous landfill site.

He searched for his cousin, but there was no trace of her.

The Treasures in the Trash Museum in East Harlem is at turns delightful and sad. Curator Nelson Molina is a city sanitation worker with a nice eye and ear for hidden garbage gems. The whole museum demonstrates how utterly wasteful humans are. Read the rest