Sotiris has actually been securing the garbage for twenty-five years. A big guy with a calm manner, he remained in his late twenties when he initially rode the trash truck out to Fyli. Athens’ only land fill was currently infamous– a filthy, hazardous office and an identified public health threat– and there was severe talk of closing it down. Sotiris remembers his coach at the time, an older chauffeur, assuring him: do not fret, it’ll just be for another year. “Nowadays,” he laughes, “we joke that we’ll retire from here.” The team aboard the truck run an onslaught of dissatisfied Athenians. They might be heckled for holding up the traffic throughout the day, or scolded for troubling sleeping citizens during the night. A member of the group, Sotiris remembered, had actually even been targeted with an air-rifle. “Everyone curses us,” he stated, speaking on condition that his complete name was kept since he wished to prevent drawing attention at work. At Fyli, the heavy truck crawls over a treacherous mountain of waste to reach the discarding zone, a journey Sotiris compared to a “day-to-day Calvary”. The only thing that might shut down the land fill, he stated, would be “an awful mishap, with numerous casualties.”
In the legendary Leonia, represented in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, all that is brand-new today will be outdated tomorrow. Addicted to novelty, the city continuously renews itself, erupting its ownerships to include the most recent upgrades. Entirely reliant on the organized elimination of the garbage, the Leonians welcome their sanitation employees with respect, as though they were angels. Nobody asks where the rubbish wind up– definitely, they presume, it needs to be “someplace outside the city”. “a fortress of unbreakable leftovers starts to surround Leonia, controling it on every side, like a chain of mountains”.
A bird’s-eye view of a little area of the Fyli land fill, revealing a zone presently utilized for discarding garbage. Picture: Constantinos Stathias
The rubbish produced by the Greek capital’s 4 million citizens and 8 million yearly visitors is discarded on a website concealed by a low mountain in the north-western residential areas. The Fyli garbage dump covers a zone of almost 300 football pitches, a surface of swelling hills made from waste and soil, in locations 200 metres high. Roaming canines stroll slopes of vibrant, compressed garbage, licking cans and tearing at plastic bags. Flocks of screaming seagulls circle overhead. The odor of rot is all over. After midday, little groups of individuals appear on the slopes, combing through the waste, pressing carts loaded with scrap metal. They live in your area, in Roma settlements adjacent the garbage dump. In the past they would have continued prospecting after dark, working under the lights of their hard-hats. Given that 2011 nevertheless, after a deadly mishap, the website has actually been sealed at sunset.
A simple half hour’s drive, traffic allowing, from the travelers climbing up the Acropolis hill, the garbage dump is a monolith to cumulative inertia and institutional failure. Western Attica, as the more comprehensive location is understood, is a base for heavy markets, consisting of oil refineries and shipyards. Significant by hardship and deprivation, the location tends to be depicted in the media as the capital’s lawless “Wild West”. It has actually seen the sharpest increase in cancer death rates throughout all Attica, the area of which Athens belongs, and the Fyli land fill has most likely played a part in this. For years, it has actually been poisoning the groundwater with heavy metals and contaminants. Nowadays, it stinks and ignites throughout the summertime, burping out harmful fumes. As the sole disposing ground for Attica’s garbage, the land fill provides millions in earnings for the regional authority and personal professionals. And for the 50,000 individuals who call Fyli town a home, waste management has actually ended up being– like the factories and refineries– another heavy market on the doorstep. “Waste represents death and wealth at the exact same time,” stated Christos Kourniotis, a high-school instructor and member of the Western Front, a grassroots pressure group that is marketing for the land fill to be sealed and ensured. “It can eliminate you, as we have actually experienced in Fyli, while for others, it can be a source of earnings.”
An image provided by a garbage-truck motorist reveals a convoy making the dangerous journey up the garbage dump’s slopes for the ‘day-to-day Calvary’. Image: Anonymous
Having actually colonised neighbouring farmland for years, the land fill is no longer permitted to broaden outwards. Nor can it be closed down till there is an alternative location for the day-to-day convoy of trash trucks coming from all over Attica. Therefore it grows up-wards behind recently developed maintaining walls.” For 60 years, we have actually been Attica’s discarding ground– adequate suffices, “stated Thomas Bizas, a retired community employee who matured in the area and still lives here. As a boy in the early 1980s, he was jailed at a demonstration over the garbage dump, which had actually then functioned for some 20 years. “It was as if fate had actually cursed me,” he smiled.” From that minute on, I never ever let the concern go.” He went on to work for the community waste management authority, serving there as a union leader, before signing up with the Western Front. “The reason is constantly the very same: if Fyli shuts down, Attica will be buried in garbage,” he stated. “The authorities leave it to the eleventh hour and after that ask: where else will it go? In truth, the land fill has actually been at capability for many years. It’s a wonder we have not had an enormous mishap yet.”
The cautions, like the garbage, have actually been accumulating. In 2003, a crack opened in the garbage dump, sending out some 800,000 cubic metres of waste– adequate to fill Athens’ Panathenaic Stadium– crashing down the slope. For the employees, the mishap happened on a public vacation, when the website was mostly deserted. In 2014, a committee from the European parliament checked out the land fill and concluded that just extreme action might stop the website from ending up being a source of “ecological chaos, illness and human suffering for a minimum of the next 3 generations”. In 2019, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis postured before a mountain of garbage, simply weeks before he was very first chosen to workplace. “Attica is resting on a significant health time bomb,” he stated. “Very quickly we will be dealing with a significant scenario.” 7 years later on, the website is no nearer being sealed. Last February, the authorities signed yet another order, extending the land fill’s operation for a minimum of another year.
Waste-pickers search the garbage dump for scrap metal and other items, in this image supplied by a garbage-truck motorist. Image: Anonymous
Greece drags on waste management in the EU. It recycles 17 percent of its local waste, according to the most recent figures from the European Environment Agency; just Romania, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Malta had an even worse record. In the Attica area, home to the Greek capital and approximately half the nation’s population, the figures are a lot more disappointing– just 7.5 percent of community waste is recycled, while 90 percent is buried in land fill. All of it winds up in Fyli, Attica’s disposing ground for the last 35 years.
More than 600 trucks show up in Fyli every day, discarding around 5,000 lots of garbage– almost two times the lift-off weight of the Saturn V rocket that took the very first astronauts to the moon. In 2025, almost 2 million lots of garbage were buried in the land fill. Upon going into the land fill website, each truck is weighed on a platform and directed to a discharging zone. The area of these zones differs from day to day. The chauffeurs manoeuvre their lorries, some weighing almost 20 loads, one behind the other, climbing up a manufactured mountain constructed from years of compressed garbage. The rough tracks resulting in the discarding zones can disappear as arbitrarily as they appear, buried under fresh trash or overlaid with brand-new paths. Sotiris, the chauffeur, explains how cars can skid and turn over in damp weather condition. “It’s like driving on ice,” he stated. “I’ve been doing this task for 24 years, and when it rains, I’m frightened. Nobody understands what surprises the land fill will bring.” Once again, he stated, his look wandering, “when we lost Argyris, it was a typical day, it was summertime.”
Sotiris is describing a July 2024 mishap in which another chauffeur was eliminated. The associate had actually parked his truck on the slope of the land fill, and marched. The car moved downhill, squashing him. Sotiris was among the very first on the scene to discover the body. The mishap was hardly pointed out in the news.
The history of post-war Athens can be informed through the layers of the Fyli garbage dump. The very first trash trucks showed up in the early 1960s in Ano Liossia, the biggest neighborhood in what is now the town of Fyli. Athens at the time was going through a building and construction boom to accommodate waves of migrants from the countryside, and Fyli was an impoverished suburban area of olive groves, vineyards, orchards and pastures. The land fill at Ano Liossia started as one of numerous informal discarding premises that had actually emerged in the Attica area. It was officially designated a land fill website under the military junta which ran Greece in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Control of the website was appointed to a recently developed public body, the main waste-management authority for Attica, understood today by its acronym, EDSNA. The regional town designated 50 hectares for disposing waste, a location comparable to around 70 football pitches.
The land fill’s early days were narrated by the author Vassilis Vassilikos, best understood for Z, his 1967 political thriller about the junta years that was adjusted for movie by the famous director, Costa Gavras. “The location is open: a flat stretch in between the mountains, neglecting the gleaming sea at Scaramangas,” he composed in 1966. “One after another, the community trucks get here and dispose their load here. A bulldozer levels out. Another, new and yellow, a little additional away, covers it with soil and flattens it like a steamroller. In this method, in time, this springy platform has actually taken shape. And bit by bit, the whole gorge that when separated the 2 mountains will be completed.” Vassilikos was best about the future: the mountain of rubbish at the website has now completely obscured the view of the sea.
The layers of compressed garbage have actually been formed into a little mountain over the years. Image: Constantinos Stathias
Drowning in more waste than it might take, the garbage dump broadened into surrounding fields. Ultimately, Athens was faced by an essential issue in waste management, stated Giorgos Velegrakis, an assistant teacher of ecological sociology at the University of Crete.” Do you focus whatever in one location or produce smaller-scale centers in more locations?” Centralised waste management interest organizers on the premises of benefit, Velegrakis stated, however it can likewise be prejudiced, triggering extensive damage to a specific environment, and individuals living within it. In 1991, Fyli was designated the sole land fill for all of Attica. “Undoubtedly, Athens selected the very first alternative: to annihilate one location alone,” Velegrakis stated.
Fyli town sits at the foot of Attica’s greatest mountain, Parnitha. In ancient times, it was the website of a protective wall, safeguarding Athens from attacks from the north-west. Today it is an entrance to the commercial zone of Western Attica, home to the oil refineries of Aspropyrgos and the shipyards of Elefsina. “We call it Athens’ yard,” stated Artemis Koubarelou, a designer and social geographer who investigates inequality. Like Velegrakis, she belongs to Commonspace, a working group of specialists that looks into ecological inequality and oppression. The concentration of activities with a “high ecological expense” in Western Attica had actually developed a vibrant, she stated, that favoured “the extension of these activities”. Contaminating markets had actually produced work and cheapened the expense of land, attracting migrants, the bad, along with the traditionally maltreated Roma– groups that, Koubarelou stated, “face systemic oppression and do not have the methods to assert their rights.”
A lot of Athenians have no factor to think about Fyli town, not to mention visit it. If they mention everything, it will be as a city badlands, avoided by cabby after dark. The traditional press tends to overemphasize criminal offense stats from the location, while minimizing the underlying hardship and absence of facilities. The reporting typically stigmatizes the Roma individuals of Fyli and the neighbouring town of Aspropyrgos, together home to the 2 biggest Roma neighborhoods in Attica, 6,500 individuals in overall.
A number of the Roma households in the location earn a living from scavenging and recycling. Picture: Constantinos Stathias
” We’re embarrassed to state we live here, “states Gogontina Atzabou, the owner of an arts studio in Ano Liossia, who matured in the area. “I saw how, with the development of the garbage dump, there was a growing sense of inability amongst the residents.” She trained and worked as a marine designer before offering it up for choreography, her real enthusiasm. Like numerous from Ano Liossia, she stated, she dealt with racist bias when she left the area– in her case, for university. “The other trainees right away presumed I was Roma. This kind of bias has actually left an enduring impression on everybody who matured here.”
Fyli can typically be a lovely area, with its low-rise real estate and large, open areas at the foot of the mountain. The land fill is never ever far from locals’ minds, or nostrils. “How can I explain the stink to you, so you can record it on the microphone,” stated Vangelis Lekatou, a pensioner I satisfied in the main square of Ano Liossia. “In the summertime, when the south wind blows, you can’t base on your terrace. You need to go within and close the windows.” The odor was especially bad in the evening, when the garbage dump was covered with a layer of soil and garden compost. “Then the square clears out in 5 minutes– the youths need to leave the coffee shops, go in other places.”
Fires tend to break out on the land fill in hot, dry weather condition, spreading out poisonous fumes throughout the area. The decaying waste produces big amounts of combustible methane gas– a typical issue with unrestrained land fills. A UCLA research study of methane-emitting garbage dumps, bring into play satellite images, ranked Fyli the 19th worst transgressor worldwide. A blaze in September 2020 was extreme sufficient to activate automated civil defence notifies to phones in the location, advising locals to remain within and keep windows and doors sealed. Regional citizens stress over the health effect of all the smoke. Lekatou observed how cancer appeared to be all over: lots of around him had the illness or were coping with somebody that did. “The cancer client in your home– isn’t that our daily truth here?”
While cancer death rates have actually increased throughout Attica, the rate in Western Attica has actually increased at double the rate somewhere else in the area, according to main information evaluated by social researcher Dimitris Bourikos. Utilizing numbers gathered by the Hellenic Statistical Authority, ELSTAT, for the 20-year duration in between 1999 and 2019, Bourikos revealed that there had actually been a 25 percent boost in the death rate from cancers in Western Attica, a 1,000 square kilometre zone that is home to more than 150,000 individuals. Throughout the rest of Attica, the death rate from cancers had actually increased by 14 percent over the exact same duration.
Roaming canines and seagulls wander the land fill in this still drawn from a smart phone video. Image: Constantinos Stathias
The Fyli land fill’s influence on public health stays uncertain. In 2017, the general public sector firm with total obligation for the garbage dump, EDSNA, commissioned an epidemiological research study to figure out how the garbage dump had actually impacted the health of employees and regional citizens. The research study was set up to be finished in 2019, however its outcomes have yet to be revealed. EDSNA did not react to my ask for remark made through email and the phone.
A report by the University of Athens in 2006 discovered that the subsoil and groundwater throughout the surrounding location of Western Attica had actually been completely harmed in the early years of the garbage dump’s unchecked operation. The report likewise regularly discovered traces of harmful chemicals such as cadmium, arsenic, cyanide, lead and zinc at depths of as much as 100 metres.
An additional research study would verify that the garbage dump has actually been launching harmful chemicals into the environment. Research study launched by the Fyli town in 2020 revealed that a worrying mixed drink of contaminants, heavy metals and radioactive components had actually gotten in the air, soil and groundwater, all at levels surpassing limitations lawfully considered safe. The research study had actually been finished in 2015, however was just shown the general public 5 years later on, on the orders of a district attorney. The workplace of Mayor Christos Pappous, which commissioned the research study, stated it had actually postponed the release due to the fact that it contested a few of its findings.
Pappous is serving his 3rd successive term, having actually remained in workplace given that 2014. An independent prospect, he assured on the project path to combat for the garbage dump’s closure and to bring back the regional environment. The different authorities included– consisting of main and local federal government– have actually regularly stopped working to advance an alternative strategy for handling Attica’s waste, successfully maintaining the status quo. In 2025, Pappous was asserting that the land fill’s closure was lastly impending, however in February 2026 the Ministry of Environment authorized the current in a series of extensions to the garbage dump’s operating licence. The town reacted by stating it would install a legal difficulty. The mayor’s workplace declined my demands to talk about this story, stating his views on the topic are popular. The Ministry of Environment did not react to my ask for remark.
The waste is 200-metres high in parts of the land fill. Image: Western Front
At different points over the last 20 years, political leaders from throughout the spectrum– covering all significant celebrations that have actually held power at the local and local level– have actually vowed to seal the land fill. Gogontina Atzabou, the choreographer from Ano Liossia, stated regional homeowners would rally behind anybody who used themselves to fixing the issue.” I think that if a mayor of Fyli were to choose to close the land fill tomorrow– if he truly took the lead– the whole neighborhood would follow. It would a minimum of interrupt the system that has actually been developed.” In the lack of political management, Atzabou stated, it was tough to mobilise the neighborhood“The garbage dump has actually ended up being like cigarettes– you understand it’ll eliminate you however you keep cigarette smoking,” she stated, summarizing what she viewed as the dominating mindset.
Giorgos Velegrakis, the sociologist, stated lots of residents saw no option to living next to a significant health threat. “It’s not that locals are uninformed,” he stated. “They understand, and to some level they accept the expense since it is their home, the only location readily available to them.” At the very same time, he stated, individuals of Fyli were not totally knowledgeable about the scale of the threats. “Often the homeowner does not come face to face with the severe, recorded reality. There is definitely an aspect of systemic concealment of the real information,” he stated, describing the hold-ups in launching research studies commissioned by the town and EDSNA. Were the complete reality to end up being recognized, he stated, it would lead “to pressure, to steps to reduce the issue, and above all, to begin considering how Athens without the Fyli garbage dump.”
Fyli too would need to find out to live without the garbage from Attica. Every year, the town gets 35-40 million euros for taking in waste from the remainder of the area. The yearly payments were set up in the early 1990s as a type of payment, after Fyli was designated the sole land fill website for all Attica. Over the last 35 years, an approximated 850 million euros have actually been moved to the city government as settlement for the Fyli garbage dump.
“Where did the cash go? That’s what we’re questioning,” asked Christina Kokkinou, the secretary of an association of moms and dads and carers in Ano Liossia. She mentions that public centers such as parks and play grounds are sporadic and inadequately preserved. “I would anticipate that in this town, with all those millions, I would not even need to spend for water. There’s absolutely nothing here, simply turmoil.” Vangelis Lekatou, the pensioner from Ano Liossia, stated the town was wasting cash on unneeded tasks. “With the settlement funds, we might have ended up being like Kifissia,” he stated, describing a wealthy suburban area of Athens. “Instead, we’re a cesspit.”
Lawn covers deserted zones of the garbage dump, beside solar farms and extra waste management centers. Picture: Constantinos Stathias
While Mayor Christos Pappous did not react to ask for remark, his declarations to the council have actually stressed that the offsetting payments assist pay the salaries of the around 1,000 workers on the town’s payroll. He likewise stated jobs in the pipeline– consisting of a solar farm and service park– would minimize the town’s dependence on those funds.
The advocates from Western Front argue that the settlement payments have actually done more damage than great. Thomas Bizas stated the funds had actually served as a sweetener, convincing the regional authorities throughout the years to accept the garbage dump’s ongoing operation. “Unbelievable amounts of cash were given out, in impact to purchase off individuals’s consciences,” he stated. Christos Kourniotis, the school instructor, stated the land fill had actually likewise produced a culture of dependence within the more comprehensive neighborhood. “People state, if the land fill goes, I’ll lose my task, I’ll wind up on the street, so we simply need to tolerate it,” he stated. “Forget about cancer, forget health problem, as long as we have our tasks. Not our health– our tasks.”
According to the advocates, the Greek state’s design of waste management has actually developed a vicious cycle. They state the design– integrating centralisation with a dependence on the economic sector– had actually wound up favouring business interests, at the expenditure of public health and the environment.
Trash trucks discard their loads on a flattened zone of the garbage dump, in this still from a cellphone video. Image: Constantinos Stathias
Off the back of the garbage dump, Fyli has actually ended up being a center for a range of waste management plants. The garbage dump website likewise houses Greece’s only medical waste incinerator, along with among the biggest recycling and composting plants in Europe, a biogas generation system, and 2 leachate treatment systems– for the elimination of toxins from water infected by the land fill. The general public sector company, EDSNA, runs the garbage dump and associated centers with Helector, a personal specialist. Helector costs itself as one of the leading waste management companies in south-eastern Europe. Active in 8 nations, it notes Fyli as a flagship operation. It did not react to my demands to discuss this story.
Waste management is a multi-billion-euro service in Greece. “Whoever organizes the system is ensured profits and earnings, due to the fact that the raw product– the waste– never ever stops coming,” stated Aris Chatzigeorgiou, an investigative reporter who has actually covered the market for the Athens-based Efimerida Sintakton paper.
Like a lot of EU members, Greece stopped working to satisfy the bloc’s”circular economy”target of recycling 55 percent of community waste by 2025. Passing present patterns, it likewise appears not likely to fulfill the EU’s next targets, of sending out just 10 percent of its waste to land fills by 2035, and recycling 65 percent of its local waste by that date.
In 2015, the Mitsotakis federal government advanced a strategy that it stated would satisfy the EU’s target for slashing garbage dump waste 5 years early. Under the proposition, Greece would develop 6 waste-incineration plants, where fuel pellets made from compressed local waste are burnt to power steam turbines. By minimizing land fill and creating electrical energy, “waste-to-energy” power stations declare to resolve 2 issues simultaneously. Their ecological qualifications have actually been contested, with professionals pointing out that these plants launch extremely hazardous gases and dissuade recycling.
In the meantime, the land fill continues to broaden behind maintaining walls. Image: Constantinos Stathias
The federal government’s strategies were criticised by ecological organisations consisting of the WWF and Greenpeace, and generated strong opposition from grassroots groups throughout the nation.”They desire us to think that this will result in the closure of the Fyli garbage dump, “stated Thomas Bizas of the Western Front. “But if the federal government’s strategy proceeds, we are most likely to wind up with both a garbage dump and a waste-incineration plant in Western Attica.”The strategies are presently being re-drawn after they were declined by all the local authorities that were anticipated to host the waste-incineration plants.
The mountain of trash in Fyli continues to grow– however this has actually been taking place for so long that it is not even thought about a subject of conversation any longer. As long as the odor of garbage does not suffocate them, the locals of Attica choose to look the other method. And yet Athens, just like Italo Calvino’s legendary Leonia, is at ever higher danger of “sinking into its own past”. If a serious rainstorm required the momentary closure of the garbage dump, as occurred in 2018, the garbage event in the city streets would have no place to go.
“We require to keep our eyes on Western Attica, since in the end, this ‘yard’ will be buried under whatever that strains it,” stated Giorgos Velegrakis, the sociologist. The impulse to turn a blind eye is as old as the garbage dump itself. As Vassilis Vassilikos composed from Fyli 60 years ago: “To those who still question the fact of what I compose, I have just one thing to advise: drop in for yourselves.”
Georgia Anagnou is an Athens-based reporter specialising in ecological justice reporting. This story was produced as part of the Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, supported by the ERSTE Foundation, in cooperation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. Modifying by Neil Arun.
I have actually seen it a lot of times that it has, in numerous methods
imply, you can constantly talk with me!). If you’ve read this far, attempt one chapter tonight with your phone in another space. Do not bear in mind, do not publish it on your story and do not ask what it’s for.
