A costly project aimed at permanently closing the Cam Ly landfill in Da Lat City, Lam Dong Province by 2022 was approved by the provincial People's Committee on Tuesday.

The shutdown of the Cam Ly landfill, located about five kilometers from Xuan Huong Lake in the city’s downtown area, is meant to address the massive amount of air and garbage pollution affecting the city. 

The uncontrolled burning of garbage at the site has led to serious air pollution in the region while two recent trash slides have buried dozens of houses in the valley below the dump.

The clearance of the Cam Ly waste dump is expected to cost the province VND48 billion (US$2 million) over a two-year period.  

Accordingly, the entire 13-hectare site is expected to be backfilled with plastic sheeting to hold the garbage in place before the area is covered in 50 centimeters of soil topped with freshly planted grass.

The project will include a 1,450-meter-long embankment, a leachate treatment station with a 50-cubic-meter daily capacity, and a tank capable of storing 360 cubic meters of leached water.

The Cam Ly rubbish dump has functioned as a makeshift landfill in Da Lat for over five decades, taking in more than 200 metric tons of unsorted solid waste on a daily basis.

It is on the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment’s watchlist of high-pollution areas that urgently need shuttering.

The landfill was briefly closed in 2015, when the entirety of the city’s garbage was transported to another plant about 25 kilometers from the center of Da Lat in Xuan Truong Commune for treatment.

However, many reasons led the provincial adminsitration to allow Cam Ly to take in the city's trash again, and it has turned into a makeshift dumpsite since then.

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