Armine Zhamkochyan, 45, has grown accustomed to the smell of garbage.

A resident of the Armenian capital Yerevan, Armine has spent her whole life living near the country’s largest landfill, Nubarashen. The site has been operating since the 1950s and is now home to a reported 7.5 million tons of household waste.

Armine lives roughly two kilometers from the landfill. While the residents have adapted to the smell over the years, she says that they often complain about the constant burning of trash and believe the fog it creates is detrimental to their health. Environmentalists warn that unless major steps are taken, there is little chance things will improve.

"From time to time there is a fire and the garbage starts to smoke,” she explains. “The smoke is unbearable in a way, it's like going through a fog... There is strong smoke and smell.”

The smoke spread across the capital in May when a large fire broke out at the site, polluting the city and its surroundings for over a week while firefighters battled the blaze. A few days after the fire broke out, the Ministry of Environment’s monitoring center warned residents that the smoke from the fire could expose them to harmful pollutants, including dioxins. Similar fires also occurred in June and July.

Inga Zarafyan, president of the environmental NGO Ecolur, underscores that the lack of information means that people were not fully aware of the degree of pollution in May—or any other time the landfill emits smoke and fog into the air. Small blazes can burn for as long as a year, according to waste management specialist Harutyun Alpetyan.

Kristina Serobyan, 47, has lived in the Erebuni district, which borders Nubarashen from the south, for 18 years. She lives on the fifth floor and often notices, especially from the kitchen window of her apartment, the gray cloud of smoke that slowly appears on the horizon. It is a sign that the windows should be closed immediately: a few more minutes and the smell will enter her apartment.

“It doesn’t come here in the form of smoke, it comes here as a smell,” she says.

Very strong and specific, the smell reminds her of burning rubber. 

"In the morning, when you want to open the window to smell the fresh air, for example in the summer, the smell can be very strong, around 7 o'clock in the morning, 7:30 or 8 o'clock, when we get ready to go to work. Of course, it is appalling. It is unpleasant, a very unpleasant smell,” she says.

Zarafyan says the monitoring centers under the Ministry of Environment should follow the direction of the wind and actively disseminate this information, announcing which way the wind is blowing, the spread in meters or kilometers, so that people at least know what they are exposed to. 

"You need a normal management plan and you need people to take responsibility for it, but nobody takes responsibility here, everything is limited to advertising announcements when it's good and total silence when it's bad,” she says. “As long as no one is responsible, no decision will be made.”

In May, a reported 3,500 trucks of soil were deposited to help clean up after the blaze. Prior to that, in August 2021, Yerevan Municipality announced that for the first time 70 percent of the landfill was covered with soil. 

Soil is a temporary solution, however, according to waste management specialist Harutyun Alpetyan, who notes that to be effective, other criteria need to be met. For instance,  soil coverage should be done systematically and more frequently: at least twice a week. 

Stressing the importance of sanitary landfills, he underscores that they should be closed off and include methane capture systems, as "controllable engineering structures." Today, however, Nubarashen and other landfills, on the other hand, are "uncontrolled dumps," he says, noting that while the city calls out people for littering, garbage disposal remains a much more serious and systematic problem.

“We have 300 landfills in Armenia, 300 working landfills. As long as they are there, it makes no sense to accuse people [of littering],” he says.

The city did announce a tender for a new landfill several years ago; it was later canceled. Today Nubarashen remains the final destination for most household garbage in the capital. Armine passes it every day on her way around the city, traveling down a road she calls “cellophane field” in honor of all the trash blowing in the wind around it.

Today, local residents try to ignore the landfill: Armine says they don't even cover their noses when they commute past the landfill, calling it “unpleasant” but “usual for us.”

Several years ago, residents of Nubarashen blocked the road to the district with their cars, demanding that officials take practical measures against the landfill and the smell, Armine recalls. "They wanted to do something,” she says. “But one day, two, three or ten, and what? You get tired.”

This feature story was prepared with support from the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) South Caucasus Regional Office. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of FES․